On Tuesday, Mike Dolinar found dozens of sled dogs dead at a kennel north of Willow. He and several other dog mushers had been calling authorities throughout the winter about problems at the property, but recently he’d heard most of the animals had been adopted out. Dolinar went to make sure that was true.
“I saw a foot dangling out of a dog house,” he said in an interview Thursday. “I just saw dead dog after dead dog after dead dog.”
The Alaska State Troopers confirmed Thursday that 25 deceased animals were found at the property this week, and that a criminal investigation is underway into potential animal cruelty.
By Wednesday, news of the incident began to spread online, particularly among Alaska’s tight-knit mushing community.
In a video recording of the discovery shared with the Daily News, Dolinar checks more than a dozen dog houses in a snowy lot in the Caswell Lakes area, midway between Willow and Talkeetna. Each animal is lying completely still, many of them inside decrepit dog houses roughly carved out of plastic barrels ringed with old excrement, neck-chains still tethering them to posts.
Dolinar, who has a background in veterinary medicine, said the dogs likely starved to death. One was frozen into a shallow puddle of ice. More dogs were dead inside a house on the property, he said.
One dog was alive. Dolinar brought it to an animal clinic for care, and estimated it hadn’t eaten in at least two weeks.
The northern Susitna Valley is filled with professional and recreational dog mushers, many of whom say they’d been calling the Matanuska-Susitna Borough’s animal control office for months warning that the dogs were not being cared for, only to be dismissed or shrugged off.
Neither of the two people who purportedly owned the dogs and kept them at the rented property responded to messages or calls requesting comment Thursday. According to a crowdfunding campaign launched in 2023, the pair ran Walker’s Wild Ride kennel together.
According to Alyssa Buser, the pair moved to the area a few years ago, and were casual, very occasional mushers.
“They didn’t really run their dogs,” Buser said.
Buser and her husband operate a sled dog tourism business and competitive racing kennel in Talkeetna, and she said the pair had worked off and on for them in a variety of capacities. Buser said she offered to help get the sled dogs placed in adoptive homes or rescue programs.
“Then he said ‘no,’” Buser said Thursday of one of the dog owners. “He told me, ‘At the end of the day, they’re just dogs.’”
One of the owners moved out of state shortly after that, Buser said, leaving the kennel in the care of his partner.
In January, Buser and Dolinar both said, several members of the mushing community started calling the borough’s animal control line to report their concerns with how the dogs were being treated. It didn’t appear, they said, that anyone was going out to the property: There were no vehicle tracks into it, snow had piled on top of the dog houses, and there were no signs the dogs were being fed or watered.
The animal control officer, Buser said, treated the complaints like “drama” and backbiting between people who just didn’t get along.
“He just lazily did a couple checks,” she said of the officer’s response. “He told me he was not going to let these dogs starve.”
Shantle Wiley is another musher in the Talkeetna area who’d been trying to get authorities to intervene. This January, she went to the kennel with supplies for the dogs.
“I had meat, straw and kibble,” she said Thursday.
Wiley contacted animal control to alert them to the apparent neglect, and an officer met her at the Caswell property. The two of them walked around, she said, the officer clearing snow from buried dog boxes, untangling chains and taking videos.
“And then told me I could not intervene with feeding or strawing the dogs down,” Wiley said.
Over and over, she said, she contacted the borough about her concerns. Since Tuesday’s discovery, she said, no one from either the state or borough has been in touch about the situation.
February and March went by, a time when many of the mushers in the surrounding area are traveling around the state for competitive races or extended excursions. By April, a number of them were once more concerned, prompting Dolinar to go out and look at the situation on the ground. After he reported finding the dead animals this week, state troopers visited the property Wednesday.
Stefan Hinman, a spokesperson for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, said Thursday that local officials were only beginning to learn about the situation.
“It’s under investigation right now, so there’s little that I can share to you at this point,” Hinman said. “We need some time to figure it all out.”
Mat-Su Borough Manager Mike Brown said Thursday the borough is assisting state troopers in the investigation and will conduct an independent review of its own actions and protocol. They will release the findings, recommendations and review publicly, he said.
“We also hear the community’s expectation that the Borough must do better in fulfilling its responsibility to protect animals and intervene,” Brown said. “I agree, we must do better. We will be evaluating how to improve our responses and involvement.”
No criminal charges had been filed in connection with the case as of Thursday afternoon.
Buser said her anger is divided between the dog owner and the borough officials who failed to intervene.
“Obviously it is so sick and disgusting to let those dogs starve to death,” she said.
Buser is also furious that publicly funded systems meant to protect animal welfare appear not to have worked in this instance, despite ample warnings.
Dolinar said that after he brought the lone surviving dog to a vet’s office, borough animal control took it Wednesday and now has the animal in its possession. They had so far refused to tell him anything about how the animal was faring, he said.
“I’m upset that they won’t tell me if it’s alive or not,” he said.
Editor's note: This story first appeared in the Anchorage Daily News and is republished with permission.