My son found Carhartt lying in his kennel outside our front door. Though he was still in preschool, Roan had been around dogs all of his life and knew something wasn’t right, that the dog wasn’t just sleeping.

He called to my wife who, though eight-anda-half months pregnant, rushed out and began CPR and even mouth-to-snout resuscitation. They put the dog in the truck and drove down the mountain to the vet’s office in Eagle River, but it was too late. Carhartt, who had been running in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race just a few days earlier, had died.

When friends run the Iditarod, we often volunteer to pick up and care for their dropped dogs because we live close to the drop-off point and have sled dogs of our own. So, when Kasilof musher Jon Little asked, we readily agreed. Little dropped Carhartt early on, when the dog simply looked tired and didn’t seem to be eating well. Once off the team, Carhartt was transported back to Anchorage and then to the Hiland Mountain Correctional Center in Eagle River, where inmates cared for him until we picked him up. He was tired but did not look distressed, so we got him situated in a straw-lined kennel with food and water. But by the next morning, Carhartt was dead.

My wife fielded calls from reporters asking about the death, and later her name began appearing on anti-mushing Web sites that vilified her with misleading or outright incorrect reports about the incident. It was tough for Melissa, an animal lover, to fi nd herself the focus of such attacks.

It turned out that Carhartt suffered from a congenital condition that would have killed him even if he had not been in the race. That fact was publicized after a necropsy was performed, but it was conveniently forgotten by those who cite the incident when condemning the Iditarod, and mushing in general.

I am not the musher in our family and don’t pretend to understand the relationship that mushers and their dogs share, but I have witnessed it and I’ve never seen a musher who didn’t treat his dogs with more care than most pet owners. But, no matter how good their care and treatment, dogs will continue to die during the Iditarod. But that does not mean that the Iditarod is killing them. (See Rebecca Luczycki’s story, “Surviving Iditarod,” Page 32.)

I contend that if you gathered 1,000 housedogs and their owners together to spend a week playing in a California dog park, some of those dogs would die. How well dogs live is the question that rarely comes up when mushing is criticized.

Sled dogs are born to run, and mushing allows them do just that. I’ve run dogs enough to know the thrill of sliding through a frozen forest accompanied only by the sound of padding feet and the scrape of the runners over the snow. I also know happy dogs when I see them, and they don’t get much happier than running sled dogs—happier than many of their counterparts who live out their lives knowing nothing more than the asphalt and concrete streets and sidewalks of the cities in which they live.

Which would you prefer?