Teacher says Brooks was slugging, kicking his dogs (Iditarod musher slugs and kicks his dogs)

Anchorage Daily News ^ | March 20, 2007 | GEORGE BRYSON

[Doginator]

Teacher says Brooks was slugging, kicking his dogs

GOLOVIN: Team had stopped on glare ice; Iditarod marshal is aware of different versions of the event.

By GEORGE BRYSON Anchorage Daily News (Published: March 20, 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.

[Old Sarge]

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