Altcar it ain’t. Open coursing back home in Ireland has always been the poor relation, constantly overshadowed by the more popular park meetings. Indeed it is only after Christmas when most of the qualifiers for the National Meeting have already been decided and there is a lull in the park program that the open game enjoys its brief moment in such limelight as there is. Indeed open coursing meetings have become a sort of Last Chance Saloon for coursing-bred greyhounds who had failed to trouble the judge in the earlier part of the season, although track-bred types, who generally meet with little success up the parks, tend to outnumber them in such events. With just ten clubs staging one meeting apiece in the 2013-2014 season, it is easily seen that there are no fortunes to be made at the open coursing. In a way that is the beauty of it. It is coursing as it once was, with a small number of greyhounds owned for the most part by local folk, friends and neighbours, competing out of a sense of sportsmanship. The prizemoney to be fair is not at all bad considering the small number of dogs competing in open coursing stakes – the Duleek Open club in Co. Meath staged just one eight dog stake and a four-dog supporting stake last year – but the silverware that goes to the winner and which, filled with the Water of Life, is traditionally passed around all those within earshot is as important, as are the bragging rights that go with it. The cognoscenti who follow the open game do so to see working coursing, with short slips and lots of turns, rather than the straight runs or the one-turn-and-in that are such a feature of park coursing these days. While they also expect to see greyhounds running without muzzles, they expect to see almost every hare wave her pursuers goodbye as she ducks through a hedge or under a gate on her way to freedom. Until now, that is, for the muzzling of greyhounds in open coursing stakes has been introduced for the first time this season.
The compulsory muzzling of greyhounds at park meetings in Ireland was introduced in the winter of 1993-1994. It had to be done. The Irish Cup meeting has traditionally been one of the highlights of the coursing season but an outbreak of disease among the hare stock at the previous season’s renewal at Clounanna turned what should have been a triumph into a tragedy. The deficiencies of the Winter Game were exposed for all to see, giving the ever-present ”antis” the excuse they had long sought to redouble their efforts to abolish the sport. That autumn muzzles of a number of different patterns were experimented with. Initially they were only fitted in the latter stages of stakes, from the quarter finals onwards. In the early rounds very long slips were used to minimise the number of hares grassed, slips so long that in a fair few cases the greyhounds never saw puss at all before she disappeared into the safety of the escape. Within a few short weeks the benefits of muzzling were there for all to see and every coursing dog in every round of every stake was muzzled from then on. The Winter Game has changed for sure, but it had to change or die. Slips may be longer and turns fewer but at least we are left with something to watch on winter weekends. Eliminating the kill in coursing has attracted new people to the sport who would have otherwise given it a wide berth without a shadow of a doubt. The diehards can grumble all they like but every cold winter thins out their ranks a little more, and without the new recruits many clubs would have folded years ago. That is enough of a history lesson. Suffice it to say the Irish Coursing Club gambled on the success of muzzling at park meetings. Their wisdom has been borne out in the intervening years by the enduring popularity of the National Coursing Meeting, the 91st renewal of which is under way as I write.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Although open coursing meetings were exempted from compulsory muzzling initially, given the success that attended muzzling at park meetings it was only a matter of time before pressure was placed on the open coursing clubs to follow suit. They didn’t go quietly. When the issue came up for discussion at the Annual General Meeting of the I.C.C. back in August it was hotly debated and when the time came to stand up and be counted the delegates were divided exactly in half, the casting vote of the Chair being necessary to resolve the impasse. There used to be one of those unwritten rules that the casting vote always favoured the status quo but significantly in this case it favoured change, some would probably say progress.
Why not muzzle all coursing greyhounds? After all for years proponents of the Winter Game have been saying that it is about comparing the speed, strength and skill of greyhounds and not about killing anything. Maybe it is time to follow that line to its logical conclusion
So that was that then, a decision was made and all hands agreed to abide by it, if not exactly throw their weight behind it? If only life was that simple. Of the nine open coursing clubs that staged a meeting last season, four have dug their heels in over the muzzling issue and will not course this season. There were dark mutterings in some quarters about the effect of muzzling on a greyhound’s desire to chase its quarry and speculation that the bigger the stake and the more times the survivors had to run, the worse would be the problem. Now although in another life I once raised a flag at the now sadly defunct Donabate meeting with a game but slow Trial Stake flop and once tried my luck at Duleek with a bitch puppy who didn’t stay far enough to win up the parks I cannot claim any great knowledge of the open game. That is probably why I fail to understand why a track dog that will chase a lure that bears not the most passing resemblance to a hare while wearing a muzzle might baulk at chasing a live quarry when similarly encumbered. The same argument could equally be applied to the coursing-bred dog who has competed in park stakes while muzzled, although admittedly most of those who subsequently run in open coursing events probably mostly made early exits in their previous careers. I did once meet a wee black bitch who allegedly could match strides with that season’s Oaks winner on the gallops at home but once a muzzle was put on her she downed tools and took no further part in proceedings, but in my admittedly meagre experience such greyhounds are a rarity.
Besides those clubs who have declined to stage meetings this season on a point of principle, it will surely come as no surprise to learn that another club had to abandon their planned December meeting due to the waterlogged state of the running grounds. They may try again at a later date but as the weather has not got much dryer in the meantime that has to be distinctly doubtful. The Roseberry and Newbridge clubs in Kildare and Dromina in Co.Limerick have all managed to run muzzled meetings, by all accounts pretty successfully. That leaves just the Boyne Valley-based Duleek club still to make their move, with a meeting scheduled for next Sunday. Hardly has the open coursing season got into its stride when it closes until next Christmas.
Maybe the diehards who refuse to countenance the use of muzzles are right, maybe coursing free-living hares on their own ground cannot survive much longer no matter what changes are made to the rules and regulations. Hares grow scarcer year on year, victims of creeping, nay rushing, urbanisation and ever increasing road traffic. The running grounds that are used in Ireland are not the big estates on which such events were staged in times past across the water. There is no Altcar, Enville nor Hoddom and Kinmount there. Rather coursing takes place over ordinary farmland, and as such is vulnerable to changes in land use and land ownership. A move from spring to autumn ploughing on traditional running grounds can force a club to look further afield, besides depriving the hares of fallow fields in which to graze during the winter. Ever earlier silage cutting may inadvertently disturb and sometimes kill vulnerable young leverets. If that was not bad enough, poachers and lurcher men are to be found everywhere and seem more than willing to travel far and wide, night and day, in search of their victims. It goes without saying they do not muzzle their charges, nor do they observe the close season or anything resembling due law. In such circumstances, open coursing clubs may find themselves forced to consider restocking their preserves from elsewhere to ensure the continuance of their sport, a step which goes against the grain for aficionados of the traditional open game.
I hope coursing over open country survives. For me it is the grassroots of the Winter Game. I enjoy it for the camaraderie, for the genuine sportsmanship, for the friendships made and acquaintances renewed while waiting for game to come to hand or over shared tea and sandwiches. These things are worth preserving and if the ground rules have to change to allow them to survive then so be it.
Another game changing decision was made at the 2015 A.G.M. concerning the introduction of drug testing at local coursing meetings. It was an important decision which needed to be made if the sport was to survive. To be fair, it was passed with a decent majority. You might have thought that given the sport’s sorry history of drug misuse that the powers-that-be would have made a great show of pursuing drug cheats for public relations purposes if nothing else. Sadly not much has been heard since then about drug testing and it looks like the Luddites have prevailed. Muzzling likewise needs to be promoted with all the razzmatazz the I.C.C can muster if open coursing is to have any chance of survival. The dinosaurs cannot be allowed to call the shots. Sermon over!
