Breaking: Protester Interrupts CEO to Plead for an End to Sponsorship of Deadly Dog-Sled Race

For Immediate Release:
November 9, 2023

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

A heavy security presence at the Liberty Investor Meeting at The Times Center didn’t prevent a PETA supporter from crashing the event today. As Liberty President and CEO Greg Maffei spoke to the audience, an animal advocate who had penetrated the meeting issued a heartfelt appeal for him to end his company’s support of the deadly Iditarod, a grueling 1,000-mile dog-sled race in Alaska in which more than 150 dogs have died. Video footage of the “plead-in”—which follows similar actions at events in Miami, San Francisco, and Beverly Hills, California, where Maffei also spoke—is available here.

Alaska Airlines, Chrysler, Coca-Cola, Jack Daniel’s, Wells Fargo, ExxonMobil, and many other companies have cut ties with the Iditarod after learning from PETA how dogs suffer and die because of the race, but Liberty subsidiary GCI, an internet service provider, is still sponsoring the notorious event to the tune of more than $250,000 every year.

“Greg Maffei heads a company that finances forcing dogs to run until their paws bleed and their bodies give out—some even die after inhaling their own vomit—with 150 dead dogs and counting,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is pleading with Liberty to stop propping up this despicably cruel dog-sled race right now.”

Up to half the dogs who start the Iditarod don’t finish it. During this year’s race—which had the smallest field of mushers in the event’s history—approximately 175 dogs were pulled off the trail due to exhaustion, illness, injury, or other causes, leaving the remaining ones to work even harder. The race ended in controversy after the winner was caught on video dragging exhausted dogs toward a checkpoint.

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 owns stock in Liberty—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview, and its motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment.”

For more information about PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.