Sled dogs abused - Golovin, AK

Wednesday, Feb 28, 2007

A Golovin village grade-school teacher who observed Iditarod musher Ramy Brooks mistreat his dog team -- an episode that led to the veteran Healy musher's disqualification -- saw something more disturbing than what Brooks or Iditarod officials have reported.

When Brooks' team refused to move, said 28-year-old Maude Paniptchuk, who teaches kindergarten through second grade at Golovin School, he kicked the dogs and hit them with his fist and a ski pole. He didn't merely spank them with a thin piece of lath used as a trail marker, as Iditarod officials said Sunday.

And contrary to an earlier account reported by Brooks' business manager, it wasn't a tangle of students that caused the dogs to stop on a patch of ice on the outskirts of Golovin, a small village on the Iditarod Trail about 15 miles west of White Mountain -- the dogs appeared exhausted, she said.

Besides herself and her 1-year-old son, there were only two small children and a grown man who observed the incident, she said. And she was not the one who initially filed a complaint about it, though she did describe what she saw to race marshal Mark Nordman when word of the incident spread.

Reached in Nome on Monday night, Nordman acknowledged that he spoke with Paniptchuk, and he doesn't dispute her story.

On her way home with her son one day last week, she saw Brooks pass through the village with his team, Paniptchuk said. Her little boy likes dogs, so she snowmachined out to the end of town to watch the musher leave. When she got there, Brooks' dogs had stopped on a patch of ice -- so she halted about 20 feet away, turned off her machine and watched.

"I didn't want to get too close, because I didn't want to upset the dogs," she said. "I heard him swearing at his dogs, trying to get them to go. Then I saw him hit a couple. And I thought, 'OK, so he's scolding them, trying to encourage them to go.' And we kept watching ... we saw him go down the line and hit each of his dogs."

She never saw Brooks hit the dogs with a piece of 1/4-inch by 1- 1/2-inch lath used as a trail stake -- as first Brooks' business manager, Greg Louden and later Nordman reported.

"No, he used his hand," she said. "And then he kicked a couple, and he used his pole -- like a ski pole -- to hit them."

At the beginning, she watched the scene alone, Paniptchuk said. But then two 8-year-old children, a boy and a girl, who followed her on foot to catch up with her, arrived and watched too.

"They said, 'Auntie, why is he doing that?' I didn't feel right explaining the actions of someone else. I said, 'I don't know, maybe they just don't want to go.' "

She continued to watch for about 15 or 20 minutes as Brooks continued without success to grab his leaders and try to pull them forward, Paniptchuk said. She wanted to leave sooner but her snowmachine wouldn't start and she had to wait for her brother to arrive to start it.

In the meantime, she noticed that a man from the village, who was out cutting wood, was watching too from the other side of the dog team. It was David Amuktoolik Jr., she said.

Amuktoolik (who doesn't have a telephone and couldn't be reached Monday to comment) was also upset by what he saw, she said.

"He even hollered, he yelled, he said, 'They're not going to go if you treat them that way ... they're not going to go if you hit them.' "

Later, the children told their parents what they saw, and one of them, Sherri Lewis, reported the incident to Iditarod officials.

Reached by telephone Monday night, Lewis said everyone in Golovin loves the Iditarod, and it disturbed her to hear her daughter tell her what she saw.

"She just said he was kicking the dogs, and dragging them, trying to get them to go, and hitting them with a stick," Lewis said.

"Just hearing this from my 8-year-old daughter ... It's just a little disappointing. ... It sounded like they were tired. The conditions weren't good. We have a lot of glare ice."

Efforts to contact Brooks or his business manager Monday night were not successful. However, Nordman acknowledged that the account conveyed to Iditarod officials by Brooks himself differs from the school teacher's.

But even the musher's version was grave enough for the three race judges to rule that he should be disqualified on those grounds alone, Nordman said.

"By no means am I disputing what Maude saw," he said. "This had to be dealt with and it had to be dealt with in a quick fashion."

Right now, Nordman said, he's still trying to officiate the end of the Iditarod.

"Once we get back to town, I'm sure there will be much more discussion on it."

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