Iditarod Racer Disqualified for Abusing His Dogs

If you read my posts on the Iditarod in the past couple of weeks, you’ll know that this particular issue gets me kind of riled up. Not only do people seem to think that the fact that it’s a “tradition” somehow justifies the cruelty inherent in the event, but I’ve even heard people try to claim that these dogs actually enjoy the experience. I wonder if all the dogs who are killed because they don’t make the cut enjoy that experience too. Anyway, here’s the most recent, and (mercifully) last little piece of sadism served up by this year’s Iditarod participants. As the race was coming to an end, musher Ramy Brooks, who was caught attacking his dogs with a trail marker, and one of whose dogs later died from apparently unrelated causes (call me crazy but my guess is that it was from being forced to run hundreds of miles in the freezing cold) has been disqualified from the race. Yup, ol’ Ramy was actually disqualified from an event that is inherently abusive to dogs for being too cruel to the dogs. Sounds like a real winner. You can check out the story here, and if you want to write to some of the race’s sponsors and ask them to make this the last year they support this debacle, just click some of the fancy buttons to the right.