The vet’s room at the track can be the loneliest place on earth at times. The crowds that fill the grandstand and pack the bar, the bookies shouting the odds, even the ubiquitous squawking public address system might as well be a million miles away on the night you get asked to play God.
There before you hyperventilating, with the kicked back sand still in his eyes, is an injured greyhound. His future is in your hands.
Too late now to wish you had opted for a cushy job as a desk jockey in the Meat Hygiene Service or the Veterinary Medicines Directorate and left the life and death stuff to someone else.
You are that someone else, and the greyhound and the trainer or kennel hand who lugged him through your door are waiting for your next move.
First all you need to establish a diagnosis. You may not need to be able to put a name to the precise injury the dog in front of you has sustained but you need to be able to quickly triage him.
The first decision you have to make is whether or not his injury is so severe that he needs to be put to sleep there and then. Such injuries thankfully are rare.
We are talking about spinal fractures for example, or depressed skull fractures, conditions from which recovery is unlikely and the impact of which on the quality of the injured dog’s life is profound.
Bluntly put, if an injured greyhound who is in great pain will not only never race again but will not be able to walk on his hind legs again or control his own bladder again then there can be no thought of keeping him alive a minute longer than strictly necessary.
The promoters and the G.B.G.B would understandably like to keep to a minimum the number of greyhounds euthansed at the track. In this sort of situation this is not a factor that needs to be greatly taken into account. The welfare of the greyhound is the paramount consideration.
Questions sometimes arise about the making of a diagnosis trackside. In a normal practice setting a dog with a suspect ted fracture of some kind would probably be X-Rayed to confirm the diagnosis and determine the severity of the injury.
Should a greyhound injured during a race or trial be X-rayed as well, just in case the provisional working diagnosis was wrong? In an ideal world he undoubtedly should be, but the world we live in is seldom ideal.
While they are undoubtedly invaluable in the diagnosis and treatment of disease, in the wrong amounts in the wrong place X-rays can be pretty nasty, causing skin burns and anaemia with acute exposure and cancer with long-term exposure, besides damaging the unborn in the womb.
Everybody grumbles about the restraints health and safety considerations place on our daily lives but this risk is way too serious to ignore. Installing X-ray equipment at the track is an expensive business.
You don’t get much of a digital X-ray machine for ten grand and if you plump for a cheaper conventional one you are stuck with the cost of proper disposal of waste fixer and developer.
The expense has only begun with the purchase or leasing of the X-ray equipment. The vets’ room would have to be modified to make it radiation proof which could cost an arm and a leg if it is feasible at all.
The X-machine at our practice is housed in a quaint converted farm building with vernacular granite walls over one foot thick and that is out in the sticks far from the madding crowd.
The vet’s room at the track, past which the world and his wife may walk on race nights, is a modern concrete construction, with walls just one block thick and it simply would not pass muster as it stands.
Presented with costs on this scale your average cash-strapped promoter is likely to laugh, if he is not already in tears, and tell you that Christmas comes but once a year. Disregarding the expense for a moment, X-raying all the greyhound casualties at the track might be nice, but is it necessary?
After all many of them will need to be transferred to the care of another veterinary surgeon for further treatment so might they not be X-rayed there just as easily?
What is important is to identify the case whose injuries are so severe that they cannot reasonably be moved without increasing their pain and distress and without exacerbating their already life-limiting injuries.
Only a brave man or a fool would claim to be infallible, but the spinal and skull fractures we are discussing here are not generally difficult to diagnose even for the relatively inexperienced track vet.
Even if he gets to play God once in a while, the law of the land does not confer any divine rights upon you and still regards the track vet as being one of the common herd.
Having established that an injured greyhound is beyond repair, the consent of the person responsible for him has to be obtained before he can be sent to his Eternal Reward.
There are legal arrangements which can be brought into play to permit the euthanasia of an animal without its owner’s consent but these are really only applicable to a dog involved in a road accident whose owners cannot be identified or cannot be tracked down within a reasonable time, rather than to a dog taken to the track by its trainer or his kennel hand.
Problems can arise with dogs whose registered owners are not present at the track at the time and whose trainer does not wish to give his consent for euthanasia without clearing it with the owner first.
Again the track vet must put the welfare needs of the injured greyhound first and should not delay euthanasia unnecessarily.
These problems may be magnified many times in the case of dogs who are the property of a partnership or a syndicate where many people may have to be tracked down and their views must be canvassed and their verbal consent obtained before proceeding with the evil deed.
When a syndicate is registered with the Irish Coursing Club, one of its number has to be nominated as its spokesman and he or she is permitted to make decisions alone on behalf of the syndicate as a whole.
While this undoubtedly has its advantages when a quick decision is required as in the case of an injury on the field, it seems, at least to my untutored eye, to leave the individual members of the syndicates with very few legal rights other than to watch their dog run and shell out for the privilege.
Syndication may be a cheap way of getting new faces involved in greyhound ownership but it may not always be the best way to keep them on board.
Those severe life-limiting injuries are in many ways easy to deal with in practice. There is usually only one approach that can be taken to them.
All that then remains is to obtain the owner’s informed consent without delay and take the appropriate steps to end the dog’s suffering.
Once our initial clinical examination has made it clear that the severity of the injured greyhound’s condition is not such as to require immediate euthanasia, we have to plan our next move.
There will be some dogs, those with certain types of hock fracture for example, who may require prompt transfer to a veterinary practice with a competence in orthopaedic surgery for further treatment.
Now most hock fractures can be repaired, at least up to a point, but some greyhounds with broken hocks will not recover sufficiently to return to the track.
That is all well and good if they are open class dogs with a bit of decent form for whom a future career at stud beckons, but what if they are novice puppies injured in their first few weeks on the track, or older dogs running in the lower grades, from whom nobody in their sane senses would want to breed?
Again, a broken hock is not an insurmountable problem for a greyhound with doting owners who were keen to keep him as a pet in retirement anyway but may prove a bigger hurdle for the trainer-owned BAGS dog who may have to wait his turn in the queue for rehoming at the local RGT branch.
Sooner or later, as you stand there poised to strap up an injured dog’s shattered hock, some owner or trainer will suggest to you that it might be best just to put the dog down rather than spend a lot of dough on him when there is nowhere for him to go anyway.
What do you do then? As a veterinary surgeon your instincts are to patch an injured dog up if humanely possible but there is little point in all fairness in you doing the first aid bit on a dog on a Saturday night only for it to be taken to the trainer’s vet back home for euthanasia on Monday morning.
On the other hand if you X-rayed the broken hock it might turn out not to be as bad a fracture as you first thought and therefore a less costly repair. Who knows, maybe given time to reflect the connections of the injured dog might relent and make that call to the RGT.
What though if the owner or trainer of an injured dog suggests to you that his charge not only does not have the makings of a stud dog or brood bitch but also has behaviour problems on such a scale as to militate against him making a successful transition to life as a pet?
We have come across them from time to time – the novice dog who was on the rearing farm in Ireland scant months ago who is so timid that you have to peel him off the back wall of his kennel every time you open its door or the poorly-socialised and chronically fearful dog whose response to looming human contact is to get his retaliation in first.
When you are carrying out a brief post-race examination of an injured greyhound that has just hobbled in from the track or been carried off it, these character traits may not be at all obvious.
The owner or trainer knows the dog better than you do, so if he says it has challenging behaviour problems and if he looks like a stand-up guy then you have to take him at his word and take his opinions on board before making your decision. What other choice have you?
The Great and Good would prefer that you did not put a dog down at the track if it is not absolutely necessary, but they are not standing beside you in the vet’s room when difficult decisions have to be made, ready to lend a supportive hand or proffer some wise counsel.
Mind you, it is all too easy to succumb to cynicism and euthanase any injured greyhound for whose death his owner or trainer can make a good case. Sometimes when you are playing God the Devil Himself chips in with his thruppence worth.
Then there are greyhounds with more minor injuries, conditions which should respond well to relatively uncomplicated and inexpensive forms of treatment.
We are talking about the torn muscles that should mend with rest, the split webs and the broken dew claws that are likely to heal well after very minor surgery and the minor cuts that a few skin sutures and a few days off the track should surely put right.
Someday you will be presented with a greyhound with a split web who is approaching his sixth birthday and is running in A8 grade on his best day.
He will be black, always an unpopular colour with prospective pet greyhound owners, and will have been at the rough end of things for long enough to have lost all faith in humanity.
His Neanderthal owner will suggest to you that the misfortunate dog is done for racing and that maybe you would consider doing everyone a wee favour by shuffling him off this mortal coil there and then when the track would be footing the bill.
The only decision you have to make in such circumstances is how to refuse very diplomatically in words of one syllable in such a manner that the low-life knows better than to ask you ever again.
About this time it dawns on you once again that yours is at times a truly lousy job, with what seems like the entire industry dumping its problems in your lap for you to solve.
A life spent vaccinating kittens in a branch of a popular corporate franchise in a local shopping mall suddenly doesn’t look so bad after all.
In the heel of the hunt all any track vet can do is examine every injured dog carefully and thoroughly, arrive at a diagnosis and come up with a treatment plan which in some cases sadly may involve euthanasia.
His veterinary training means that he is the person best placed to make those decisions at the track at the time.
Now I am not suggesting that track vets should have carte blanche to do as they please. They are already bound by the rules and regulations of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons and by the law of the land in the shape of the Animal Welfare Act 2006 and the Welfare of Racing Greyhounds Regulations 2010.
Of course the GBGB has to have some oversight over the activities of track vets at the tracks they regulate and the promoter has to have his ten cents worth too.
Concerned Citizens and Good Samaritans have a right to a spot of whistle-blowing if they see something that concerns them. Such is the world we all live in.
Ultimately however the clinical decision making and in particular the decision when to euthanase an injured greyhound falls squarely on the shoulders of the track vet alone.
That is where the buck stops. That is what he gets paid the big bucks for.
Anybody who thinks track vets get their money handy is more than welcome to have a go themselves. If they do not wish to put up, then perhaps they should shut up, cut track vets a little slack and let them get on with what is a times not an easy job.
Sermon over!
Twitter: @GSUnderTheRadar
