Greyhound racing in the UK has undergone somewhat of a face lift in recent years. Pints of beer in plastic cups and cigarette stained cafes are steadily being replaced by corporate entertaining suits and ‘champagne dinners’. Sadly, behind this new veneer, one fact about greyhound racing remains the same: dogs die and suffer in their thousands to meet industry demands.
The statistics are depressing and the individual case studies heart-breaking.
It is estimated that, in the UK alone, around 10,000 dogs are killed each year. That is roughly enough animals to fill two American football fields. Of course, this isn’t even taking into account the impact of the terrible welfare conditions that many racing dogs are kept in, the staggering incidence of racing injuries and the appalling euthanasia methods often reported.
Here at the League, we have been calling for urgent laws to be passed to help improve the welfare of racing greyhounds. Sadly, our views and those of hundreds of other animal welfare charities were ignored when, in 2010, the Government introduced a set of woefully inadequate regulations, which will do very little to help improve the lives of these dogs.
So is this the picture all over the world? Absolutely not.
Just this week, we were joined by two representatives of GREY2K USA, a remarkable American organisation. Since their formation in 2001, the charity has been instrumental in the passing of greyhound protection laws and the phasing out of dog racing in half of all greyhound racing States. This is a truly remarkable achievement and a real example to us all in the animal welfare movement.
We spent our meeting reviewing the state of greyhound racing in the UK and the USA, uncovering some interesting comparisons and developing plans for the future to bring some of GREY2K USA’s success to the UK!
We very much hope our new transatlantic friendship will help move us closer to our goal of stopping the preventable commercial exploitation of racing dogs on both sides of the Atlantic.