First past the post, or past it?

[Lou.Crowley]

Have you ever “bet on the dogs” or gone to a race track for an evening´s entertainment with your friends? If you have, I´m sure that you enjoyed a civilised and pleasant evening. But look carefully behind the “fun” image of this sport, and you´ll begin to uncover a sub-culture of abuse, cruelty and slaughter.

There are over 30 race courses registered with the National Greyhound Racing (NGRC) in the UK, and the NGRC co-ordinates the registration of dogs, and acts as the judiciary and disciplinary body. Any dog racing on these registered tracks must be identifiable by a totoo, and kept with a registered trainer/ owner/ manager.

However, there are currently also over 50 independent tracks, and dogs racing on these tracks have no protection, meaning that a huge slice of the lucrative racing sector is completely unregulated.

Tha fastest dogs race on the regulated tracks, therefore when the fateful day comes and the dog is no longer “ first past the post”, it is either destroyrd or sold on to the independent sector. Here it may race for another year or two before, finally, worn out and deemed useless, the dog will be abandoned or killed.

Consider the facts:
-Unregulated, independent tracks are not required to have a vet present during racing events.
-Injured dogs may wait for hours in pain before they are treated.
-At the age of 4 or 5 , whee their racing career is over, many greyhounds are slaughtered.
-In the UK alone 40,000 greyhounds are needlessly slaughterd each year.
-Young dogs who do not make the grade will not even live to see their first birthday. They will be destroyed.
-A slow or injured dog is not a profitable dog. Favourite disposal methods include drowning, beating the dog to death, poison, shooting, starvation and abandonment.
-Many abandoned dogs die in traffic accidents, as they wander, hungry and bewildered, after being dumped. Many will simply starve to death.