Once seen mostly on the racetrack, greyhounds are now seemingly everywhere in civilian life, thanks to re-homing schemes that have sprung up to counter cruelty and over-breeding
A group of the hounds that changed the course of Lisa White’s life are confined within her rural NSW home, awaiting our arrival. We drive into her yard expecting the sort of uproar large, territorial dogs usually turn on for strangers. Yet even when we step onto the verandah there are no barks or growls, only birdsong and silence.I look through a window and see the dogs standing attentively in rows looking back at me, their mouths set in what appear to be polite smiles.
Willy’s background is a lot less amusing than his party trick. Four years ago, he was among 19 half-starved former racing dogs rescued by White and her volunteers from a bush property where they lived with a deregistered trainer who dwelt among them in a humpy. “It was a horrendous situation,” she says. “The dogs were all feral, just living in paddocks with scars all over them from fighting.
No statistics on the number of greyhounds bred or put down annually are available from the industry’s independently managed state and territory jurisdictions. Greyhound racing in Australia and New Zealand is overseen by Greyhounds Australasia Ltd , whose CEO – Cherie Nicholl – tellsthat GA is still “in the process of scoping a consistent national data framework” to provide figures for greyhound breeding and euthanasia.
As White sees it, a major problem with the adoption system is that the way greyhounds live as racers, or even potential racers, often makes them unsuitable as pets: “They’re kept in isolation, and encouraged to chase lures, so they’re often aggressive, with anxiety issues, and have to be retrained as pets. But some of them will never be suitable.”
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