When was the last time that you read a story about the wrong dog accidentally running in a race?
The Star’s ‘Remember When’ column was so littered with ‘wrong dog’ stories that many were never highlighted.
The person most responsible for their disappearance is probably the Crayford paddock steward of 20 years Angie Fotheringham.
The Ladbrokes track was a pioneer in the introduction of greyhound micro-chipping and Angie recently returned from a trip to Ireland where she was asked to demonstrate the practice to 22 Irish Coursing Club stewards.
She said: “I had an amazing time, very interesting. I was even shown how to do the earmarking, though it isn’t something I would ever want to do.”
Micro-chipping was introduced in the UK seven years ago and Angie remembers it as a frantic period.
She said: “I micro-chipped thousands of greyhounds in a very short space of time. Not only did we have our own dogs at Crayford, I was travelling around many of the big kennels doing hundreds of dogs in a day.
“These days I hardly do any because in recent months, the Irish dogs have had to be exported with the micro-chips and passports.”
The process was originally treated with great suspicion when first introduced with various tales of micro-chips migrating around the body.
Angie said: “I cannot recall a handful of issues in all the dogs I have chipped. I once hit a blood vessel and it resulted in an area being slightly raised for a few days and then went down again with no long term damage.
“As for the migration, I don’t want to criticise but it seems to happen when some of the vets do them.
“They tend to put the micro-chips in the shoulder, but I always chip between the shoulder blades, where it can become embed in the muscle with no side effects, and that is how I was showing them in Ireland.”
