Photos: ‘Dog Pack’ Protests London Hotel Over Iditarod Sponsorship

For Immediate Release:

11 April 2019

Contact:

Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327, ext 222; [email protected]

PHOTOS: ‘DOG PACK’ PROTESTS LONDON HOTEL OVER IDITAROD SPONSORSHIP

PETA Action Urges to Stop Sponsoring Race That Hurts and Kills Dogs

London – Today, following PETA US’ first-ever video exposé of kennels tied to the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska, a pack of chained PETA “dogs” descended on the headquarters of – whose hotel still sponsors the cruel event, despite being aware that more than 150 dogs have died since the race began. Activists also held signs that read, ”

Photos are available here and here.

Footage captured by an eyewitness who worked at Team Baker Kennel revealed that dogs’ only protection, even when the wind chill dropped to minus 28 degrees Celsius, was dilapidated, open-faced boxes or plastic barrels.

Dogs were chained and denied contact with one another. Many had worn-down, raw, and bloody paw pads from frantically running in tight circles at the end of short metal chains, and one dog at musher Mitch Seavey’s kennel was denied veterinary care for the open, infected wounds caused by the constant chafing of his collar. Other dogs left without veterinary care include one who sustained a crippling spinal cord injury that left her dragging her back legs and a former Iditarod champion with painful arthritis left to limp and cry at the end of a chain.

“When dogs used in the Iditarod aren’t being raced until their paws bleed and they die from inhaling their own vomit – which has happened frequently – they’re chained around the clock, able only to run in circles and howl,” says PETA Director of International Programmes Mimi Bekhechi. “Every company that cuts ties with this hideous race helps bring us one step closer to ending it, and we’re calling on Millennium & Copthorne Hotels to do just that.”

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 hundreds of dogs are pulled out of the Iditarod every year because they’re too injured or ill to go on – and countless others die immediately after the race, during training, or while chained to plastic barrels outdoors during the off-season.

Coca-Cola recently ended its , adding its name to a long list of companies – including Costco, Jack Daniel’s, Nestlé, and Pizza Hut – that have cut ties with the race.

For more information about the use of animals for human entertainment, please visit PETA.org.uk.

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