Chrysler to Face Tables-Turned ‘Dog Sled’ Protest Over Iditarod Sponsorship

PETA Will Pressure Chrysler to Cut Ties With Deadly Dog Race

For Immediate Release:
February 26, 2020

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

On Thursday, a PETA supporter will pull a sled full of “dead dogs” around a busy intersection in downtown Detroit to protest a Chrysler franchise’s continued support of the Iditarod—a deadly race in which dogs are forced to run approximately 1,000 miles in subzero temperatures, leaving many exhausted, injured, ill, or even dead. The protest comes before the Iditarod takes place in March and calls attention to PETA’s first-ever video exposé of champion mushers’ kennels, which revealed that dogs’ only protection—even when the wind chill dropped to 19 degrees below zero—were dilapidated, open-faced boxes or plastic barrels to which they were chained in the ice and snow.

When:    Thursday, February 27, 12 noon

Where:    Campus Martius Park, 800 Woodward Ave. (at the intersection with Cadillac Square, by the Michigan Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument), Detroit

“Dogs used for this horrific race are chained outdoors in freezing weather, denied veterinary care, and raced until they inhale their own vomit and eventually die,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Chrysler’s support of the Iditarod is a badge of shame, and PETA wants the car company to end it.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—notes that more than 150 dogs have died since the Iditarod began, and that number doesn’t even include the countless dogs who died while chained up outside or who were killed for not being fast enough.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.