The dogs of Iraq are dying.
As the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race moves toward its end in Nome with a well-meaning few fretting, as they always do, over whether dogs born to run really want to run 1,000 miles, the dogs of Iraq are dying by the thousands.
We are not talking here about the occasional death that happens to canine athletes in the Iditarod.
We are talking about something closer to canine genocide.
"Municipal workers are hunting them down, slaughtering some 10,000 in Baghdad just since December," the New York Times reported Sunday. "Most of the dogs are killed with rotten raw meat laced with strychnine, a poison used in pesticides and against rodents.
"In some cases, particularly around the city's sprawling garbage dumps, the dogs are instead shot. By the time this campaign is over this month, perphaps 20,000 dogs will be exterminated," said Shaker Fraiyeh of the ministry's veterinary services company.
Twenty thousand dead dogs in a month, killed for no real reason but that they exist in Iraq, and in this country we have people worrying about whether a single dog might die doing what it loves in the Iditarod.
Unless you scour the inside pages of The Times on weekends, you are probably reading here for the first about the carnage in Iraq.
The supposed horrors of the Iditarod are, of course, a different matter. PETA, the Humane Society and others launch publicity campaigns attacking the Iditarod every year.
It's a convenient way for them to garner attention, and attention is what helps them raise money:
Look at us! We're doing great things for the animals! Send us cash!
Needless to say, they haven't been worrying about the dogs in Iraq. Maybe if these were whales. Whales get worried about everywhere it seems, but dead dogs only attract attention if they happen to die in the Iditarod.
Elsewhere, who cares?
Your average animal shelter kills dogs by the dozens every week. And in Iraq, the Times says, "the holy Shiite city of Karbala was so overwhelmed with stray dogs last year that officials there offered 6,000 dinars ($5.30) for each animal caught and handed over to the municipality. The dogs were shot and buried en masse."
A bounty on dogs.
Personally, it leaves me with a sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach. I confess to being a bit of a stupid, old dog lover, or at least a stupid, old lover of most dogs.
I have no patience for aggressive dogs. I wouldn't have any more of a qualm about putting a bullet in the brain of one of them than I would have doing likewise for a charging grizzly bear.
But well-socialized, friendly dogs are another matter. And those are the kinds of dogs you meet in the Iditarod these days. It is a shame that any of them die, but a few do.
A tiny percentage fall victim to exercise the same as people.
The upside of exercise is that it will help you live longer and healthier. That's well-documented.
The downside of exercise is that it can, sometimes, kill you. That's well-documented too.
If you work things out statistically, comparing the death rate per mile for Iditarod dogs and human marathoners corrected for the huge differences in life spans between the two species, an Iditarod dog and your average marathoner face similar odds of death from running.
Groups who make money off their opposition to The Last Great Race will never tell you this. They won't provide you much insight into how a lot of these goofy Iditarod mushers love their dogs as much or more than their children, either.
No, anti-Iditarod groups will just keep repeating this sort of thing over and over:
"No records were kept in the early days of the Iditarod, but before the start of 1997's race, the Anchorage Daily News reported that 'as many as 34 dogs died in the first two races' and that 'at least 107 (dogs) have died' since the Iditarod's inception."
A woman who calls herself Jennifer O'Connor regurgitated that information for newspapers all around the country this year. She bills herself as PETA's "entertainment campaign writer," whatever that means.
She professes to be upset that dogs die in the Iditarod. One has already died this year. There might be more. The average is two to three per year. Veterinarians along the Iditarod Trail go to great lengths to try to prevent any deaths from happening, but sometimes animals just die.
If you've ever owned a dog, you probably know they don't live forever. Nothing does. The only given in life is death. Those that die doing the things they enjoy are the lucky ones.
But I doubt O'Connor would understand this. If she did, she wouldn't make this claim:
"Dogs love to run, but even the most energetic dog wouldn't choose to run more than 100 miles a day for 10 or 12 days straight while pulling heavy sleds through some of the worst weather conditions on the planet.''
Well, actually, some would.
Some dogs, like some people, thrive on hard work. Others, again like people, just like to sit on their butts and bark.
The former do the Iditarod. The latter go to work for PETA.
I only wish those PETA dogs would bark less about the Iditarod and more about what's going on in the Mideast.
"Some people believe that the dogs spread disease, not a difficult case to make in a society that generally shuns dogs as pets, believing them to be contrary to Islamic edicts on personal cleanliness," the Times reported.
That's just sad. Dogs are to be loved. They are among my best friends, even that stupid, little West Highland terrier named Hobbs that Robbie brought home solely because she thought he was cute.
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
CRAIG MEDRED
OUTDOORS