Quote:
Originally Posted by frozenchief
Even with that penalty, Seavey won this year.
As far as the penalty, the rules govern what you must do if you have to kill a big game animal, such as a moose or a bison. Killing a big game animal is obviously an option of last resort but the results require that if you do, the animal must be properly gutted/cleaned.
For those who do not know, gutting means cutting the animal open and removing its intestines and organs. This does two things, both of which help preserve meat. The first thing it does is to cool an animal quite quickly. The fur on these animals is extremely thick and dense to retain heat. By opening a carcass, air can get through the fur and cool an animal.
Similarly, most of the bacteria that speeds decay is in the intestines. By removing the intestines, it will cool the intestines slowing their rate of decay but it will also remove a source of contamination from the carcass.
The race involves various checkpoints that are roughly 50 - 90 miles apart. These dogs run at around 6-7 mph so there might be a delay of a few hours for a musher to get to the next check point and tell people what happened. Local residents will go out and find the animal and bring it back to town, cutting it up and distributing the meat so it wont go to waste. (about 80+% of the local diet will be game anyway) In such circumstances, it would be tempting to not sufficiently gut an animal to save time. This rule is designed to prevent people from doing that so that the meat can be salvaged. I expect that Seavey told them what happened, continued with the race, locals went to the carcass and realized it had not been sufficiently gutted and informed race officials.
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The article says this, which confuses me:
The Iditarod can impose time penalties if a majority of the three-person panel agrees a rule was broken and that a competitive advantage was gained. Penalties can range up to a maximum of eight hours per infraction.
The 'and' is a key term here. What competitive advantage did he gain by not gutting the moose thoroughly? I guess it's a competitive advantage that he saved time by not doing it, but he obviously lost time by tangling with the moose in the first place and doing a gutting, even if it was insufficient.
Eh, maybe the competitive advantage is because he shortened the gutting time, but it still strikes me as odd. I'm sure he would have gone faster if he'd never tangled with the moose in the first place. So maybe instead of getting a competitive advantage, the penalty was for reducing a competitive disadvantage?