Baird Private Wealth Management Ends Iditarod Sponsorship After PETA Push

Dog-Shaped Vegan Chocolates Sent to Company in Thanks for Kind Move

For Immediate Release:
March 5, 2020

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

Following communications with PETA, Baird Private Wealth Management—an international financial services firm with more than $235 billion in client assets—confirmed that it has ended its sponsorship of the Iditarod. In thanks, PETA is sending the company a box of delicious dog-shaped vegan chocolates.

“When they’re not being run to injury, exhaustion, or death on the Iditarod trail, dogs are tied up in the snow with nothing to do but run in tight circles until their paws bleed,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA thanks Baird for condemning this cruelty by cutting ties with the Iditarod.”

Dogs used in the Iditarod are forced to run about 1,000 miles through biting winds, blinding snowstorms, and subzero temperatures. More than half of those who start the race don’t finish because they’re too ill, injured, or exhausted to go on—and more than 150 dogs have died as a result of the race, not including countless others who were killed simply because they weren’t fast enough or who died during the off-season while chained up. A first-of-its-kind PETA undercover investigation of two former Iditarod champion mushers’ kennels revealed that dogs were denied veterinary care for painful injuries, kept constantly chained next to dilapidated boxes and plastic barrels in the bitter cold and biting wind, and forced to run even when they were exhausted and dehydrated.

Baird Private Wealth Management joins a long list of companies—including Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola, Costco, Jack Daniel’s, Maxwell House, Nestlé, Panasonic, Pizza Hut, Rite Aid, Safeway, State Farm, and Wells Fargo—that have stopped supporting the Iditarod, and PETA is calling on Chrysler to follow suit.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.