Getty Image
An aggressive moose injected a fair amount of drama into the Iditarod Sled Dog Race earlier this week, and Dallas Seavey—the legendary musher who shot and killed the beast—has been hit with a penalty for failing to properly gut it before continuing.
You’d be hard-pressed to find many athletic competitions that feature a set of rules concerning what you need to do if you kill an animal over the course of an event. However, there’s at least one very notable exception in the form of The Iditarod.
What is arguably the biggest event on Alaska’s annual sporting calendar was first held in 1973, and every year, dozens of mushers and their teams of between 12 and 16 sled dogs convene for a showdown where they’re tasked with navigating the remote trail that stretches for more than 1,000 miles between Nome and Anchorage.
The Iditarod isn’t for the faint of heart, as participants must brave incredibly frigid temperatures, unpredictable winter weather, and other threats they risk encountering in the Alaskan wilderness—including a number of potentially dangerous animals that call it home.
The 2024 Iditarod officially kicked off on Sunday, and it didn’t take long for a few mushers to encounter a setback courtesy of a moose that went after one team before Dallas Seavey—a five-time champion who holds the record for the fastest time ever recorded (7 days, 14 hours, 8 minutes, and 57 seconds)—shot and killed the animal that was subsequently struck by another competitor who hit the carcass with their sled.
As I alluded to above, Iditarod rules dictate that anyone who kills a large creature like a moose, caribou, or buffalo must stop to gut the animal before continuing the race to assist the team that’s dispatched to the location to ensure the meat gets distributed to local communities instead of going to waste.
According to ESPN, Seavey attempted to check that box but admitted his efforts may have left a bit to be desired, saying “I gutted it the best I could, but it was ugly” after informing race officials of the incident on Monday.
Unfortunately for him, the three-person panel that’s tasked with evaluating the quality of the gutting job decided Seavey failed to live up to its standards, as Iditarod officials issued a statement saying they “determined that the animal was not sufficiently gutted by the musher.”
Seavey was subsequently hit with a two-hour penalty that will be added to the 24-hour layover all mushers must take at one point during the race. We’ll have to wait and see if it will come back to bite him, as he leads the rest of the field by around 20 minutes as of this writing.