F1’s Deadly Dog-Sled Race Tie-Up Draws PETA Stock Purchase

For Immediate Release:
March 16, 2023

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Englewood, Colo. –

Stockholders, start your engines! PETA has just become a shareholder in Formula 1 (F1) in order to push its locally based owner, Liberty Media, to stop sponsoring the deadly Iditarod dog-sled race, in which more than 150 dogs have died.

Although nearly every other major sponsor—including Alaska Airlines, Chrysler, Coca-Cola, Jack Daniel’s, Wells Fargo, and ExxonMobil—has cut ties with the Iditarod, Liberty subsidiary GCI, an Alaskan internet service provider, is still sponsoring the notoriously cruel race to the tune of more than $250,000 every year.

“There are no wheels on the dogs abused for the Iditarod, so for a thousand miles, their paws pound snow and ice until they become raw and bloody, and their bodies often give out,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is gearing up for F1’s next annual meeting, at which it will point out that brilliant engineering and human skill, not cruelty to dogs, is what the fans want.”

Up to half the dogs who start the Iditarod don’t finish it. Nearly 170 dogs have already been pulled off this year’s trail because of exhaustion, illness, injury, or other causes, leaving the remaining ones to work even harder. The leading cause of death for dogs in the Iditarod is aspiration pneumonia—caused by inhaling their own vomit—and the race’s official death toll doesn’t include countless others who were killed simply because they weren’t fast enough or who died during the off-season while chained next to dilapidated boxes or plastic barrels in the bitter cold, a practice exposed in a PETA undercover investigation.

PETA—which also owns stock in Liberty Broadband, part of the Liberty family of companies—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview, and its motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment.”

For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.