“They bought virtually every single dog, bar a couple who didn’t make their reserves. Even those that were too slow to win a race were sold. Twenty years ago, probably half of them would have been headed for the vets on the way home.”
Brian King, who bred a string of English and Irish classic winners in his time at Shelbourne Stud in Nenagh, returned to Ireland after a five year break and popped into the recent Thurles Sales.
He couldn’t believe his eyes as some of the slowest greyhounds to be born in Munster in the last two years were snapped up by various English individuals including at least one racecourse promoter.
It is becoming a familiar tale. Every week, I take calls from Irish friends who can’t believe the demand for young dogs of all abilities as the squeeze on runners ratchets up another notch.
But while most welfare concerns predicted for the unfolding media rights battle have been focused on potential over-racing and an increase in future re-homing, there is a surprising upside.
In their campaign to bring an end to greyhound racing, the abolitionists cite three issues. Indeed their whole welfare agenda is based on three pillars.
1) Dogs who are too slow or don’t chase. 2) Racing injuries. 3) Re-homing.
(More about the latter two issues in future articles. There is plenty going on!)
As for non-chaser and slow hounds. . . In Britain, we simply don’t have a problem with non-chasers. For a start, we will only produce around 1,400 pups per year
Of those, around 1,000 will contest races. A small percentage of the remaining 400-ish will succumb to injury or illness between six weeks and racing age.
However, the vast majority are snapped up by folk who would rather have a 14 month old non-chasing pet, than a five year old ex-racer. Any re-homer will tell you, the young dogs are always the first through the door.
Ireland has different issues. For a start: volume. Even with declining numbers, there will be around 14,400 greyhound pups born in Ireland this year.
Just over half will come to England – GBGB registered 7,604 greyhounds for racing in 2016.
Some will remain and race their entire careers in Ireland. We don’t know how many but I did a quick survey on last week’s Irish winners – 345 greyhounds.
Of those – 90 were more than three years old and presumably never likely to be exported. But if we settle on the 2014 whelps, there were 68 of them. (Many of the ’12 and ’13 whelps will have raced but are already retired.)
So 68 greyhounds out of 345 represents just about 20% of the total. So is it unreasonable to assume that 20% of Ireland’s 14,400 greyhounds born in a single year will only race in Ireland? That works out at around, 2,880 greyhounds.
So that would leave somewhere under 4,000 who are born but are not recorded as having racing careers in either country.
Oh – the antis are just loving this!
For the time being, let’s exclude the who die from illness or injury in rearing. We will exclude the unraced bitches kept for breeding and the dogs exported abroad, be that the Continent, the USA, Pakistan etc.
But we cannot exclude coursing dogs. The Irish Stud Book does not differentiate between trackers and coursers.
While race breeding might be in the doldrums, Irish coursing breeding, like coursing itself, is positively thriving.
There are 89 coursing clubs affiliated to the ICC. During the season, you might have as many as a dozen different coursing meetings taking place over a single weekend during the winter, many staging a mixture of 8, 16 and occasional 32 runner stakes.
Maybe we have found some of the ‘thousands of destroyed greyhounds!’
So how many dogs are we talking about?
It is difficult to give an exact numbers of dogs engaged in coursing since many of the stakes are open to dogs of different ages.
If we want a ‘yearly figure for missing dogs’, breeding gives us our best lead since coursing and track breeding rarely interconnect.
To give you one example, Coursing Derby winner and stud dog, Adios Alonso.
Alonso has never thrown an open race winner on the track, but in 2016 he sired just under 600 coursing pups from 88 litters. That’s 15% of the 4,000 ‘missing’ greyhounds from one stud dog.
Or what about Newinn Wonder – 70 plus coursing litters for the same period. Or Razor Ashmore – 19 litters! or Kingsmill Magic, or Mafic Magic, Bexhill Eoin. . . .
Of course, there is still a gap between pups born and traceable careers. We don’t know how big it is or how many greyhounds are involved, but we are certainly not deliberately hiding it.
Which leads us back to Thurles Sales.
For years, it would have been a final outlet for the slowest dogs. Track down the dogs who might have ended up in Macau or Spain, and their sad and sorry careers would have traced through the likes of Limerick or Thurles sales. The 40gn dog. . . .the ‘N/S’ dog.
Not any more.
There are now countless opportunities for dogs for whom grading time will be measured by sundial.
Several tracks have already announced plans to extend their graded strength downwards – even Towcester which boasts probably the toughest ‘grade for grade’ strength in the country, will extend its A10 to A12.
This is the absolute bottom of the grading barrel but will betting shop punters ever notice the difference?
