The Greyhound Board of Great Britain continues to make hugely significant progress in animal welfare as is revealed in the 2020 injury and retirement figures – writes Floyd Amphlett.

In its simplest form – greyhound welfare breaks down into two target areas: injuries and retirements with a Venn field overlapping the two: mortalities.

All have shown significant welfare progress in the last year:

Injuries

The decline in the number of injuries was a ‘given’ due to the temporary cessation of racing during the first lockdown. Even so, the net trend is down.

However, the fatality rate is marginally up which will be a cause for concern. Among the recent measures to address that was a decision to appoint a track liaison officer, a role that has been inexplicably been left vacant since the Board under former chairman Tom Kelly, deemed it no longer a necessity.

Retirement

The fate of ex-racers has long been a subject of passionate debate with anti-racing racing campaigners claiming that the majority of ex-racers are destroyed. The latest figures clearly show the most impressive set of statistics in the history of the sport with 95% of ex-racers now shown to have been re-homed. No other country has ever come close to these percentages.

The 2020 introduction of the Greyhound Retirement Scheme (colloquially known as ‘the bond scheme) has been a huge success, and should progress further this year – to a point whereby many retirement branches already have waiting lists of would-be owners and are forced to access greyhounds directly from Ireland.

Mortalities

The most contentious set of figures relate to mortalities. There has been remarkable progress in certain areas, notably ‘treatment cost’ or ‘economic’ euthanasias which have reduced seven-fold in two years, mainly due to additional treatment funding through the injury recovery scheme.

Grants were made to fund the treatment of 300 greyhounds at a cost of £90K. There is clearly more scope here.

The ‘designated unsuitable for homing’ category has shown even greater progress falling from 190 to 23 in two years. While opinions vary on whether a tiny minority of greyhounds could ever be considered safe at large in public, particularly around other animals, it would not appear a major issue to fund that small number of greyhounds in a kennel environment for the rest of their natural lives.

The ‘PTS at track’ or ‘PTS away from track’ could arguably be combined, as they both amount to the same issue – terminally injured greyhounds. It is, by far, the biggest issue in the report and also the most complex.

Views differ, even between vets, on the manageability of certain injuries eg a broken front leg. Could more be done to ease suffering/limit physical damage while the dog is still on the track – for example?

There is also wide diversity of opinion between owners, trainers and again, even the veterinary profession, on quality of life, whether for example, an amputation is desirable.

Last, but not least, there is the personal moral stance on the use on whether the use of animal in sport can be justified whereby even one death is unacceptable.

That particular debate is certainly not exclusive to greyhound racing and the report notes that injury mortality rates in greyhounds are a fraction of those experienced in horse racing for example.

GBGB is currently revisiting its policy on the ethics of racing – more to follow.

Finally – there are the ‘sudden death’ and ‘terminal illness/natural causes’ totals. Whether they should be registered alongside injuries and elected euthanasias is a moot point – albeit, they would have to be acknowledged in terms of making the final figures tally.

The welfare progress made by the GBGB was acknowledged by Animal Welfare Minister Lord Goldsmith who stated:

The full GBGB press release reads: