Rachel Spenia's List: Greyhound Racing paper - English

• Massachusetts activists are collecting signatures to get a statewide initiative on the November ballot that would ban commercial greyhound racing by 2010. The Committee to Protect Dogs says state records show that since 2002, 728 greyhounds have been injured racing at the state's two tracks.

  • search "The Committee to Protect Dogs"

• Supporters of the dog racing bill say it's necessary to save 225 jobs — including pari-mutuel clerks, bartenders and security workers — to preserve tax revenue and to retain the 5,000 people who visit the track each week.
• "By throwing out an industry, you have to move out of state," said John O'Donnell, a Massachusetts greyhound trainer and member of Protection of Working Animals and Handlers, a pro-dog racing group seeking an inquest into last year's election. "So it's not like I can just up and get another job in Massachusetts if I want to stay in my profession."

• And most of the dogs have spent their lives inside racetracks and kennels with little exposure to families, children or even the most basic household activities, say greyhound lovers such as Rhonda Mack, who took in two dogs from the Dairyland Greyhound Park in southern Wisconsin, which recently closed.
• "You bring a dog home . . . they've never been outside the racetrack," said the 50-year-old from Lake Zurich, Ill., who now has three greyhounds, including new additions Lexi and Jack. "They go into your house -- they don't know what a window is, they don't know what stairs are. They walk right into windows like they aren't even there."
• Greyhound lovers are constantly trying to clear up misconceptions about the breed. Despite their athletic training and competitive instincts, the dogs are calm and easy to care for and do not require constant exercise as might be assumed, they say.
• As "sight hounds," they are bred to chase a lure, so that chase instinct could be a problem in homes with cats or other small pets, she said. Rapa recommends that greyhounds be kept in a fenced backyard or on a leash.
  

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• An announcement crackles over the loudspeaker: "And here comes Rusty." Rusty is an artificial rabbit, a lure that dangles from a mechanical arm to entice the dogs to run.
•  Greyhounds have to endure a brutal three-phase training process before making it to the racing circuit. According to Baker, the first test for the pups is agility training. At about age one, they learn to chase a jackrabbit, one of the quickest and most agile small animals alive, on a coursing track. This is called jacking the dogs. If the dogs catch the rabbit, the trainers quickly grab it away from the dogs. An expensive commodity at $23 each, jackrabbits are used continually until they are no longer challenging for the dogs. Then they are just tossed in a barrel. "We've found that some of these rabbits are still alive," Baker says. "I saw one with major lacerations and its intestines hanging out--and it was still breathing."
  
• If greyhound pups prove agile enough to survive the coursing track, they move to the next phase of training, called the whirl- a-gig. Here the 14-month-old pups are taught to run in a circle by trainers, who dangle live animals in front of the dogs to encourage them. Since agility is not an issue at this level, trainers don't have to invest in expensive jackrabbits; any small animal will do. Rabbits, kittens, or guinea pigs simply hang from a pole and watch a pack of greyhounds closing in, Baker says. As a reward, the trainers let the dogs catch up to the animal and tear it apart.
  
       After the whirl-a-gig the greyhounds proceed to the larger training track. Since the dogs now wear muzzles over their mouths, they can only get their teeth into small pieces of the animal. "They will use the same domestic rabbit on set after set after set of dogs. These animals are being tortured," Baker laments.
  
• Other industry officials, however, flatly deny the problem exists. "We don't use live lures anymore," says George Johnson, executive director of the American Greyhound Track Operators Association (AGTOA). The dogs are trained on "artificial lures, and the industry is vehemently opposed to the use of live lures." In fact, Johnson continues, if anyone is caught using live lures, the NGA suspends that trainer's ability to register dogs, which in effect puts them out of business.
  
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       But according to Tim Horan, managing editor of THE GREYHOUND REVIEW, the official publication of the NGA, "The NGA has never suspended anyone for the use of live lures.
• According to David Wolf, director and founder of the National Greyhound Adoption Program in Philadelphia, most greyhounds that are not good enough to make the cut at any level of training are killed. Some breeders, Wolf says, have been in the business so long that they can tell from the greyhound's joint structure and health at birth whether the pup has a chance at the big time. The puppies that can't make it are "put down right then and there," says Wolf. "They just bash the head in, and that's the end of it."
• reyhounds that survive to about 16 to 18 months are ready for the racing circuit. If they remain injury-free, they may race for two years or so before they become too old for the sport.
•  Each year the NGA registers about 40,000 dogs. So what happens to the 40,000 that were registered and raced the year before? Humane officials believe that the vast majority of these dogs are shot, sold to labs for biomedical research, or euthanized at shelters. Wolf contends that if you add all the dogs culled from the training process to all the dogs killed after their racing careers are over, you'll get a figure of 50,000 to 90,000 greyhounds killed each year.
• Although greyhound adoption agencies cannot keep up with the supply, they do adopt out about 10,000 each year
•  Greyhounds eat 4-D meat. The 4-D stands for animals that are dead, dying, diseased, or down at slaughter. When sick and near death, cattle are pumped full of drugs like penicillin, procaine, and trimethoprim in a last-ditch effort to save them. These animals are processed at rendering plants, which sterilize the meat by boiling and make it into products like tankage, a protein source for animal feed. However, much of the meat is sold raw and unsterilized as food for greyhounds.
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       "What you have then is ground-up raw meat from animals that have died from infectious and contagious diseases being packaged and sold all over the United States to race tracks," Strohbehn says, adding that the sale of this meat violates Iowa State law, most other state laws, and the U.S. Federal Pure Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act.
  

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• If it passes, Massachusetts will follow seven other states (Maine, Virginia, Vermont, Idaho, Washington, Nevada, and North Carolina) that have banned live dog racing and/or simulcasting using the legislative process. Ballot initiatives like the one in Massachusetts allow the voters to pass a statute or constitutional amendment directly, without involving the legislature.
•   The first commercial greyhound racetrack opened in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1925. It was quickly followed by the Biscayne Kennel Club in Miami in 1926, and in the next decade eight more tracks opened in Florida. By 1960, 28 greyhound tracks were operating in seven states. By 1990, 19 states had legalized pari-mutuel wagering, and the number of racetracks had doubled to 56. This rapid expansion fueled a breeding frenzy to supply them. In the 1980s alone, an estimated 450,000 racing greyhounds were born.
• The greyhound's speed and agility had doomed the breed to servitude under a human subculture whose only interest was gambling profits.
  
• In the mid-1980s information began to surface in the mainstream media about the grim fate of racing greyhounds and the slaughter of tens of thousands of other small animals in the training process.
• A racing greyhound's welfare at each stage of life is largely dependent on the dog's ability to generate money. Greyhounds typically begin racing at the age of 18 months. To qualify at an official track, the dogs must finish in the top four in two schooling races. If successful, the dogs enter maiden races. As they win, the dogs advance up through grade D, C, B, and finally grade A, as they finish in first, second, or third place in three consecutive races. Alternately, as they begin losing, they decline in grades using the same criteria in reverse. By failing in D, the lowest grade, a dog is considered "graded-off" and may be sent to a less competitive track. Once a dog has graded-off at an end-of-the-line track, he or she is either killed, kept for breeding, or turned over for adoption.
  
• Kennel operators typically lease the dogs from their owners in return for 65 percent of the dogs' winnings. Dog owners are often people who invest in greyhounds as a sideline business or hobby, and may never actually see the dogs. In other cases--usually large farms of 600 dogs or more--the dogs are bred, trained, and raced by the owner.
• In 13 of the 15 racing states, the dogs are housed at a kennel compound on the racetrack grounds. They are often kept muzzled in stacked metal cages or wooden crates for 20 or more hours a day. Bedding is shredded newspaper or small carpet remnants; flea and tick infestation is common. The typical diet is raw "4-D" meat (taken from diseased, dying, downed, or dead livestock).
•     At about six months of age, greyhound puppies are sent to training farms where they race around a track in pursuit of a lure. To encourage this behavior, trainers traditionally used "live lures"--rabbits, cats, and other small animals--tied to the lure mechanism. The dogs are encouraged to shred the animals to build a taste for blood and instill the instinct of running after the fake lure at the track.
• HSUS estimated that more than 100,000 small animals were killed every year to train racing dogs
• Today, the industry insists that most greyhounds are trained with mechanical lures and that only about 10 percent of trainers still use live lures.
  
• Many die because of hazardous kennel or track conditions, negligent handling during transport, preventable diseases due to a lack of basic veterinary care, and epidemic outbreaks of highly contagious illnesses.
  
• At Alabama's Birmingham Race Course on June 21, the lure operator failed to stop the lure when the race ended and Randad, a 2-year-old male, became trapped inside the rail. Investigators concluded the greyhound was dead before the returning mechanical lure struck him. In Massachusetts, 87 greyhounds burned to death on Valentine's Day 1992 at the Lynn Kennel Compound, a 50-year-old facility that houses 1,600 dogs in 28 wooden buildings for the Wonderland track in Revere. Eight more greyhounds perished there in another fire in June 1999. Nearly 100 greyhounds nationwide died of complications from kennel cough in two large outbreaks in the last decade; a 1999 epidemic affecting 5,000 dogs placed every track in the country under quarantine for weeks. A condition later identified as canine streptococcal toxic syndrome killed 24 dogs in Florida, Kansas, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. The afflicted dogs developed fevers of 107 degrees, hemorrhaged nasally, rectally, and from their urinary tracts, and died within 24 hours.
• it is estimated that 20,000-25,000 greyhounds are still being killed annually
• Animal advocates conservatively estimate that this "sport" has claimed the lives of more than 1 million greyhounds in its 75-year U.S. history.
  
• ny greyhound bred to race on an official racetrack must be registered with the National Greyhound Association (NGA) at the age of 3 months and again at 18 months. According to industry breeding reports published in THE GREYHOUND REVIEW, 65,601 litters were registered by the NGA between 1989 and 1998. Multiplying these litters by an average of 6.5 pups per litter results in a minimum total of 426,407 greyhounds born in this period. By comparing the number of dogs registered by litter at age 3 months against the number of dogs registered individually at 18 months, the attrition rate for puppies and young dogs averaged nearly 20 percent, or 84,385 greyhounds culled from the system in one decade. According to industry insiders, unwanted puppies are disposed of by drowning in a bucket of water or by deliberate separation from nursing mothers.
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       Puppies and young dogs deemed unsuitable for racing, and older dogs graded-off from the racetrack when they can no longer "run in the money," are disposed of by various means, including euthanasia, gunshot, starvation, bludgeoning, electrocution, and abandonment. They also are sold or donated to medical research laboratories, sold to coyote and rabbit hunters and amateur "match" racers, and sold to racing interests in other countries.
  
• According to a November 1996 PENSACOLA NEWS JOURNAL article, 600-800 greyhounds at the Pensacola Greyhound Track are euthanized every year and dumped in the Perdido Landfill. "It's not wonderful what I do, but as long as greyhound racing is legal, we need to be sure that when these animals are disposed of, it's done in the most compassionate way possible," said Andy Hillman, veterinarian at the 54-year-old Florida track. In Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from 1987 to 1992, more than 1,200 racing dogs were euthanized at a local shelter. Also in 1992 in Chandler Heights, Arizona, the decomposing bodies of 143 racing greyhounds were discovered in an abandoned citrus orchard 30 miles southeast of Phoenix. Each dog had been shot in the right temple with a .22-caliber pistol, and their tattooed left ears had been cut off to prevent identification.
•  Other killing methods are more crude and protracted. Two hundred racing greyhounds were found starving to death on an Ocala, Florida, farm in November 1991. According to an eyewitness, the five-acre property was littered with shallow graves and burial pits. Of the 101 greyhounds found in 1990 starving at a private kennel that served the Tucson Greyhound Park in Arizona, only 40 survived.
• In 1991 a trainer at the Coeur d'Alene track in Idaho described the electrocution of greyhounds using a device called the "Tijuana hot plate," so called because "in Mexico they used to electrocute their dogs." It consisted of a metal rod that was placed in the dog's rectum plus a metal clip that was attached to the dog's lip; electrocution resulted when the device was plugged into a wall outlet. According to the trainer, the killings took place in a "partylike" atmosphere.
  
• Susan Netboy, who later founded the Greyhound Protection League (GPL), a national greyhound advocacy organization
•   One of the most shocking research cases came to light two years ago. Documents obtained under a public records request sent to Colorado State University (CSU) by GNN in March 1998 revealed that 2,652 racing greyhounds had been euthanized at CSU's School of Veterinary Medicine between January 1995 and March 1998. The 320 pages of acquisition sheets listed dogs who ranged in age from puppies to 10-year-olds; nearly half were 2-year-olds. Approximately one-third of the dogs were anesthetized and used to teach surgical procedures before being destroyed. Two-thirds of the greyhounds donated to the school were considered "excess" and were euthanized immediately after arrival.
• Part of the public relations makeover included the formation of the American Greyhound Council in 1987 to "provide for the welfare of the racing greyhound and the betterment of the greyhound industry." It provides funding for a toll-free adoption inquiry number for the industry-controlled Greyhound Pets of America (GPA), a national adoption group, and provides yearly stipends to GPA chapters and track adoption programs.
• The industry peaked in 1991 with a wagering handle (total amount of money bet on races) of $3.4 billion, making it the sixth most popular spectator sport. By 1995, attendance had dropped 25 percent and the total handle had dropped 26 percent to $2.5 billion. Attendance and handle continue to drop steadily with each passing year.
  

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