Rather than providing his elderly lead dog with the veterinary care and comfort that she desperately needed, he chained her beside the frozen sea—all alone and unable to escape the Arctic cold. She had no shelter at all until PETA’s eyewitness built one for her, as the wooden box next to her area was only accessible from an adjacent pen. Baker said that Snickers had suffered from arthritis even when she ran the Iditarod. He admitted that she was “in a lot of pain” and had been for years and that he needed to “put her out of her misery.” He stated that he planned to shoot her but had not yet done it because “I just don’t have a good place to bury her.”