This year’s Iditarod sled-dog race in Alaska has gotten off to a bumpy start.
Mushers and their 16-dog teams, who train year-round to race across a 1,000-mile stretch of ice and snow, try to prepare for all eventualities during the treacherous journey across Alaska. But they weren’t quite prepared for the twists and turns of this year’s race.
For Dallas Seavey, a five-time champion, it’s been especially rough. First he ran into a moose that attacked his dogs, injuring one of them, before Seavey shot the moose dead. Then Seavey was penalised for failing to properly gut the moose, as required by race rules.
For those just catching up on all the dogsledding drama, here’s what you need to know.
Is everyone OK?
So it seems. One of Seavey’s dogs, Faloo, was injured and was flown to Anchorage to receive emergency veterinary care. She “arrived in critical condition and soon after arriving she went into surgery”, Seavey’s kennel wrote in a Facebook update, but has since been recovering well. She has been cleared to return home.
Who was the troublesome moose?
Seavey may not have been the first musher to encounter this particular moose. Racer Jessie Holmes, who had been ahead of Seavey, told Iditarod Inside that he had also seen an angry moose, on a narrow stretch of the trail, and tried to run past it.
“It started rearing up and going after the back-dogs,” he said, before it kicked at him. So Holmes punched back. “I just punched it in the nose, because that’s all I could think to do,” he said. “It stopped chasing us and stopped kicking at us and we just cruised right by. It all happened so damn fast. It was the scariest thing that ever happened to me on a dog team, really.”
What happened after Seavey killed the moose?
Several mushers who came up behind Seavey ran into the carcass on the trail, and had to lead their dogs over it. “I can’t say I’ve ever run a 16-dog team over a moose, so that was kind of interesting,” musher Bailey Vitello told Insider. “So check that one off the bucket list – don’t know if I want to do it again, but it was cool.”
How often do mushers encounter moose?
“I don’t know if it’s common, but I wouldn’t say it’s uncommon,” said Sarah Keefer, who has been helping last year’s Iditarod champion Ryan Redington train his race dogs and is a musher herself. Most of the time, mushers are able to resolve such encounters without discharging any weapons, she said. But if an aggressive moose, which can weigh up to 1,600lbs (725 kg), approaches, mushers have to defend themselves.
In 2022, rookie musher Bridgett Watkins and her sled team were charged by a moose bull while they were training, days before the race started. She emptied her handgun, shooting at the animal’s chest, but that wasn’t enough to kill the moose, which stomped her dogs for 50 minutes. “The helplessness I felt was horrific,” she told Alaska Public Media. Eventually she reached a friend for help, who arrived in a snowmobile and killed the moose with a rifle. Four of her dogs were seriously injured, but all survived, and Watkins went on to compete in the race.
In the 1985 Iditarod, musher Susan Butcher had the lead when she encountered a moose she fended off with an axe and a parka. Two of her dogs died in the encounter and 13 were injured.
What’s the proper way to gut a moose?
The Iditarod’s rule 34 states that “on the event that an edible big-game animal (ie moose, caribou, buffalo), is killed in defence of life or property, the musher must gut the animal and report the incident to a race official at the next checkpoint”. If following teams encounter the scene, they must help in the gutting. “No teams may pass until the animal has been gutted and the musher killing the animal has proceeded.” After field-dressing the animal, the musher “must report the incident to a race official at the next checkpoint”.
The rule ties into statewide hunting regulations, which require hunters salvage all the edible meat from animals they kill, reflecting “the high value Alaskans place on game meat, ethical hunting and respectful treatment of game animals”, according to the department of fish and game.
Seavey told Iditarod Insider at a checkpoint after his moose encounter: “I gutted it as best I could, but it was ugly.” The hack job was evidently not to the liking of a three-person panel of race officials, who found that “the animal was not sufficiently gutted by the musher”. In a press release, the Iditarod Trail Committee helpfully defined “gutting” as “taking out the intestines and other internal organs of (a fish or other animal) before cooking it”.
Still, the moose was retrieved, its meat processed and distributed in Swetkana, a village of about 60 that lies along the Iditarod trail.
What does Seavey’s penalty mean for his chances of winning this year?
Seavey received a two-hour penalty that will be added to a mandatory 24-hour rest he and his team are taking in Cripple, Alaska, about 425 miles into the race. At this stage, when the fastest mushers are just about halfway through their 1000-mile journey, it’s hard to say who’ll finish first – and by what sort of lead time.
Is the race always this dramatic?
The race was founded in 1973 to revive a culture of dogsledding that had begun to die out with the advent of snowmobiles and airplanes. For generations, Alaska Natives had relied on dogsledding to move supplies across vast expanses of the snowy, frozen landscape, and the race’s founders hoped to save the mushing dog breeds raised to withstand extreme temperatures and long-distance runs.
“This idea was to sustain the sport and raise dogs who will continue on with the lifestyles and the culture that have been in Alaska for thousands of years,” said Keefer, who hopes to join the race herself in coming years. “It’s about the preservation of this tradition and culture.”
The race’s route crosses through the lands of the Athabascan, Iñupiaq, and Yup’ik peoples, who have hunted and travelled across the trail for generations. Settlers later used it to supply gold mining towns, and transport ore to the bay. It has never been a sport for the faint-hearted.
Although Keefer says this year’s conditions have been fairly smooth, the race has increasingly been marred by unpredictable weather, as global heating brings unseasonabl conditions to the Arctic region. Races have been shortened or rerouted on years where there has not been enough snow to start the race.
The 2017 Iditarod was marred by a doping scandal. Seavey’s dogs tested positive for a banned substance, the opioid painkiller tramadol, after his second-place finish. Seavey denied giving his dogs the substance, saying that their feed may have been sabotaged, and officials were not able to prove that he acted intentionally. He retained his second-place title.
