The first musher to scratch in this year’s Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, rookie Brenda Mackey, said Friday that she dropped out because one of her dogs needed “immediate veterinary care” — conflicting with the race’s initial reports that all her dogs were in good health.
Mackey dropped out Tuesday afternoon in the Tanana checkpoint, 202 miles into the 1,128-mile race.
The Iditarod Trail Committee said in its initial announcement that “Mackey had 14 dogs in harness when she arrived in Tanana, all in good health.” The only other information on her decision was that Mackey, part of one of Alaska mushing’s most storied dynasties, had made the decision “in the best interest of her team,” a generic term that has become a standard part of Iditarod scratch announcements.
Writing from the checkpoint in Galena on Friday morning, the Interior Alaska musher told a different story.
“I didn’t opt to ‘scratch with 14 healthy dogs in harness,’ I had 13 in harness and one I felt needed immediate veterinary care and I made the decision to get her to a vet as fast as I could,” Mackey wrote on Facebook.
In a lengthy post, Mackey described having some reservations about a dog named Jett while in Tanana on Monday night because she seemed off. She said she asked a vet to check the dog again, but everything came back looking normal. Mackey left Tanana a little before 11 p.m. that day. After 26 miles she stopped to give her team a snack, and the trouble with Jett started a mile later, she said.
“I should’ve listened to my gut and sent her home. I stopped to look at her and she was rapidly panting with her front legs shaking/trembling also very rapidly. I took her off the line and she collapsed. I got out my dog bivvy sac and put her into it,” Mackey wrote.
She got out the emergency device all Iditarod mushers are required to carry and pushed the SOS button.
“I felt I needed immediate emergency vet care for her. She wasn’t moving in the bag,” Mackey wrote in the post.
Another musher, Minnesota rookie Emily Ford, came upon Mackey and her team, and used a thermometer she carried on the sick dog, according to Mackey. It came back at 103.5 degrees, at which point Mackey decided it would be faster to turn back toward Tanana rather than stay on the trail waiting for help, she wrote.
It isn’t clear what happened when Mackey activated her emergency device.
“I knew I’d be disqualified once I pushed my button, but in that moment of urgency I just wanted help for her. However no one knew I’d pushed it,” Mackey wrote.
On Friday afternoon, the Iditarod Trail Committee said in a follow-up statement that new information had emerged from the checkpoint since their initial announcement Tuesday about Mackey’s scratch.
The committee said that Mackey had 13 dogs in harness with one dog, Jett, “resting in her sled due to health concerns.” Race organizers on Friday also said that while Mackey tried to activate the SOS button on her tracker, she didn’t do it correctly.
Mackey said she’d heard three theories about what might have happened: that it malfunctioned, that she pressed the wrong button, or that she didn’t hold it long enough.
“I pushed it 5 times in a row to really drive home I have an emergency, that was my logic and there’s no indication in a change in the blinking red light so I just kept pushing it. Apparently there’s no record of any activation,” Mackey wrote.
En route to the checkpoint, Mackey wrote, her dog Jett “seemed revived,” and was behaving normally by the time vets examined her in Tanana. The dog was sent to Anchorage for more veterinary work, which as of Mackey’s post Friday morning has not yet conclusively explained what might have happened, she said. Mackey on social media last week described Jett as a 3-year-old that can run in any position on the sled dog team, including lead.
In a phone interview from Galena, Mackey said she told the race judge in Tanana that she’d pushed the button, which he wasn’t aware of. When she had the team parked and Jett was inside with the vets, the official approached her, she said.
“Andy came over to me, is like, ‘You know, Brenda, I hate to do this to you, but you pushed your button,’ ” she said. “ I said, ‘Andy, I know I pushed my button. Yeah, that’s fine.’ ”
She said she thought she was signing a disqualification form, but she realized in hindsight — after her husband told her how it had been reported — that it was a scratch form.
“Because (the race official) was like, ‘Well, we need to know a reason why, and the most common thing to write down is just, you know, for the health of your dog team.’
“I just wasn’t even computing and processing and not even looking at the paper, just scribbling my name down,” she said.
“Nobody even asked me if I wanted to scratch, but whatever, and my intent was to push the button, and I knew I’d be disqualified. So the intent was there, even if it didn’t work. So that was my choice.”
She said she wasn’t sure why reports would have had her scratching with a fully healthy team of 14 dogs.
“It was really confusing, and I was up last night thinking about it,” she said. “I was really disturbed and bothered by — it’s like … kind of insult to injury here. I felt like it was in this really desperate situation.”
In its Friday statement, the Iditarod Trail Committee said: “We are happy to report that Jett is seemingly in good condition and appears to be healthy and in high spirits. The ITC apologizes for the miscommunication and any angst we may have caused Brenda, her team and her followers.”
Mackey said she didn’t think the situation with Jett was taken as seriously as it should have been in Tanana. She wrote on Facebook that “Jett’s bloodwork revealed an ALT elevated very high at over 600 so she was kept overnight for monitoring and more bloodwork the next day.” The dog also continued to have a high temperature.
Mackey wrote that Jett continued to have a high ALT — a liver enzyme value that veterinarians often measure as part of blood tests — of 400 the following day.
National animal rights group PETA raised questions about the Iditarod’s handling of the incident and reiterated its call for the race to end permanently over concerns about the sled dogs’ welfare.
Mackey comes from one of Alaska mushing’s most storied families. Her grandfather, Dick Mackey, won the race in 1978. Her father, Rick, won it in 1983. And her uncle, Lance, won the race four times consecutively.
Brenda Mackey has mushed and raised dogs for most of her life, keeping a kennel with her husband, Will Rhodes, in Two Rivers. The two even met at a thousand-mile sled dog race, though it was the Yukon Quest, not Iditarod.
Mackey had raced in one prior Iditarod, the heavily modified 2021 route during the COVID-19 pandemic. That year she scratched at the checkpoint in Nikolai.