“I’ve had 10 bitches mated since April 4th and there are two more waiting to be mated. The way I see it, there is going to be a huge shortage of dogs. In my opinion, it is the biggest threat to the future of racing.”
Ian Greaves is one of the handful of commercial breeders in Ireland and despite the uncertainty over the Coronavirus pandemic, he is thinking long term and backing his opinion with action.
He said: “I was chatting to the local steward and he was saying how much breeding is back since all this started. I am thinking of 18 months time.”
The Kildare based exiled Geordie whose successes include the likes of Toms The Best, Top Savings, Swift Hoffman, Domino Storm and Micks Best Hero, currently has exactly 50 greyhounds available between schooling and racing age.
He said: “I have one September ’18 pup, a handful of Novembers and Decembers, all the way through to April 19 pups who are about to go schooling, which is very manageable.
“For example, last November we were up against it. We’d had sickness and the cough and hadn’t been able to do any schooling. We built up to around 70 youngsters and I was a bit concerned; but they had all gone by February.
“Although there is no racing, the market is still good, I sold four pups last week. There are a few time-wasters among the calls, people with time on their hands, but some decent people too. The bottom end of the market has definitely improved massively in the last year or so and we are also getting many more enquiries for saplings.”
One surprise element to the increase in demand has been for retired dogs.
Ian said: “From time to time we have pups injured in schooling and there are bitches who fail to make it as broods. I advertise them on greyhounddata and they just go immediately. I have never known the demand for them to be so high.”
For those who follow the ‘Swift’ hounds, there are some interesting mums in whelp including open race dam Swift Linscott (dam of Swift Fabio and Swift Taxman) plus a last litter for Swift Foundry (dam of Azzurri Genesis).
