Vet To Check Iditarod Sled Dogs For Wear Effort Aimed At Solving Mysterious Deaths In Recent Races
This is what Glenn Cantor is looking forward to as he starts his vacation today:
Sleeping on the floor of a village community center, maybe even in a tent, in the Alaska outback.
Wearing four sets of long underwear beneath his quilted pants.
Taking off his inch-thick mittens to examine hundreds of dogs with his bare hands.
Did we mention the temperature can reach 60 degrees below zero?
“It’s kind of like going to the beach,” said Cantor, 42, “only the beach is frozen. So it’s a great opportunity.”
An added, er, benefit is the Washington State University veterinarian will have a front-row seat for the final days of the Super Bowl of sled-dog races, the Iditarod, as he leapfrogs among the race’s 26 checkpoints to make sure the animals are fit to continue racing. While he’ll be looking for the usual signs of wear - weight loss, cut feet, pneumonia - he will also be participating in a major study to solve the mysterious deaths of several dogs in the past few years.
Such work has become increasingly important as animal rights groups have criticized the race for being cruel to the 1,000 or so animals competing each year. Cantor, like race organizers and mushers, contends the animals love to run and will take it upon themselves to revolt if they feel they are being worked too hard.
But dogs still die, as happened when a 3-year-old female on the team of Rick Swenson collapsed Sunday, the race’s second day. Swenson, the winningest competitor in Iditarod history with five victories, was forced to leave the race under a new rule ejecting any musher with a dog death deemed preventable.
Upon his return to WSU, Cantor, a veterinary pathologist, will analyze tissues from the dog in an effort to determine how it died.
“It is very common to have a cause of death completely unknown,” he said. “It is in humans, too.”
Such was the case in 1992, he said, when three Iditarod dogs under separate owners died for no apparent reason. One died 20 hours after being pulled from the race in what appeared to be fine health.
The dogs’ hearts were sent to Saroja Bharati, a Chicago-based pathologist specializing in “athletic heart syndrome,” a condition that claims athletes who appear to be in exceptional physical condition.
Bharati plotted the hearts’ electrical pathways and found microscopic scarring and inflammation around nerve fibers. The damage, said Cantor, appears to short-circuit the heart, shutting it down the same way bad wiring knocks out a household lamp.
With an eye toward predicting which dogs might already have damaged hearts, veterinarians took electrocardiograms of each dog before this year’s race. Now if a dog dies, Cantor will examine it for any underlying disease and Bharati will look at its heart for any abnormality that might have been revealed by its electrocardiogram.
Ultimately, said Cantor, “if it’s possible to examine all these dogs, we might be able to take a few of them out of the race and not have them get into any trouble.”
, DataTimes