New Billboard Blasts Jack Daniel’s for Iditarod Sponsorship

PETA Calls On Company to Stop Supporting Deadly Race

For Immediate Release:
January 29, 2018

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Because Jack Daniel’s is a sponsor of the Iditarod despite the race’s recent doping scandal and a veteran musher’s revelation that trainers in the industry have killed “hundreds on top of hundreds” of dogs who didn’t make the cut, PETA plans to place a billboard near the company’s Lynchburg headquarters calling on it to end its sponsorship of the deadly race.

The billboard shows a blood-soaked husky crushed beneath a Jack Daniel’s bottle next to the words “Jack Daniel’s Kills Dogs’ Spirits.”

“Jack Daniel’s will be Tennessee cruelty if it continues to sponsor a race that has forced dogs to run with bloody paws and torn muscles until they dropped dead on the trail,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on the company to cut ties with the Iditarod and its legacy of dog doping and killing.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—points out that more than 150 dogs have died since the Iditarod began, and those are just the reported deaths. This number doesn’t include dogs who died immediately after the race, during training, or while chained to plastic barrels outside. In the 2017 race alone, five dogs died in less than one week. Recently, a whistleblower released disturbing photographs and video footage of reportedly dying puppies and injured, sick dogs at a kennel owned by “Iditarod royalty” Dallas Seavey, the four-time race champion at the center of the recent dog-doping scandal.

In 2017, Wells Fargo and Guggenheim Partners both ended their Iditarod sponsorships and State Farm confirmed that it wouldn’t be renewing its one-year sponsorship, and many other major brands—including Costco, Maxwell House, Nestlé, Pizza Hut, Rite Aid, and Safeway—cut ties with the race years ago.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.