Michael Watts MRCVS
Looking at the greyhound racing industry in England through Irish eyes, I see a whole lot of dogs who seem to race very
frequently. I suspect I am not alone among those born on the right side of the Irish Sea in being distinctly underwhelmed at the prospect. Instinctively I want to cosset young dogs, if not actually to wrap them in cotton wool, and introduce them to the track gently, by easy stages. Chucking them in at the deep end and hoping they can figure out how to swim seems intuitively the wrong way to go about it.
Now I know that in many ways I am comparing chalk with cheese here. English trainers have to supply so many runners per week to meet their obligations under their BAGS contracts without which their tables would be bare and their children barefoot. Back home dogs race to win prizemoney, they race to land a gamble now or race so that they can find time for a coup later. There is no appearance money and the also-rans go home empty-handed so there is no great incentive to run a dog unless he is in with a decent chance. Indeed given that gambling is what pays the rent for all but the lucky few in the greyhound game in the Ould Sod, there is a very good argument for not racing a dog too often so as to keep him unexposed for as long as possible.
Maybe I am missing something but a sport which revolves around the running of greyhounds who compete one or twice a week for months at a time and whose every race, trial and handslip is a matter of public record may appeal to penny ante punters in high street betting shops but it bores me to tears, besides which it does not leave many opportunities for the owners of the average grader to make a bob or three. The love of the game only gets owners so far. Not to put too fine a point on it, outside of the playing fields of Eton it is the winning, not the taking part that matters. In the school of hard knocks, owners need to recoup some of their expenses once in a while or they will become dissatisfied and drift away from the greyhound game. Given the current miserly levels of prize money, owners have to have a punt to cover their costs and it is hard to get a decent price about an exposed dog. Racing managers and bookies the length and breadth of the country will doubtless have crossed my name off their Christmas card list by now, but perhaps readers will buy at least some of my arguments for running young greyhounds less frequently.
All this was based initially on the premise that it was better for young greyhounds to race less often. This looks good on paper. The fewer times a dog runs, the fewer opportunities he has to get hurt. Let me play the Devil’s Advocate here and put forward a counterargument. The bones of a young greyhound are made up of living tissue which is constantly remodelling itself in response to the stresses and strains under which it finds itself. That being the case, there must be some optimum frequency of racing which exposes that novice dog to those stresses and strains just often enough to adjust and adapt to them. To run him more often that this is to allow him no time to bounce back from the rigours of one race before he goes into traps for the next one. By the same token, to run him less often than this is not place his green bones under stress often enough for them to remodel themselves in response. Maybe the longer periods of relative rest between races mean that his bone growth may effectively go back to square one after each outing.
There is one way to settle this argument. Let us look at the statistics for the number of times greyhounds race in the first three or six months after their first grading trial and compare them to the number of injuries in greyhounds over the same time period. Racing office staff record details of every race and trial and track vets log every significant injury at the track so that should not be impossibly difficult. There must be a database we can access, perhaps via the GBGB website, or perhaps there is a well-thumbed ledger in a drawer somewhere in 6 New Bridge Street to which the less internet-savvy might refer. Readers who need to get out more may recall that Condition 6 of Part 1 of the Welfare of Racing Greyhounds Regulations (2010) stipulates that “When a greyhound is injured when participating in a race, trial or sales trial the attending veterinary surgeon must make a record which the operator must keep at the track, setting out (a) the nature of the injury sustained (b) either the microchip number or tattoo number of the greyhound if the greyhound is microchipped or tattooed (c) details of any treatment administered to the greyhound (d) the distance of the race, trail or sales trial in which the injury occurred; and (e) the date of the injury”. Injury data relating to tracks owned by members of the Racecourse Promoters Association is reported to the GBGB Welfare Committee and to the Greyhound Forum twice a year.
On the face of it this looks pretty comprehensive. As the Regulations require the information to be kept for at least ten years, there should be five years data available for analysis by now, which should surely be enough to point us in the right direction at very least. There is one small fly in the ointment, more of an elephant in the room in truth. The Regulations may oblige track vets to record details of every greyhound injured during racing and trials and they may oblige promoters to keep these records in a safe place at the track for ten years but they do not oblige either party to give any third party access to the records nor do they oblige the track vet, the promoter or the GBGB to do anything useful with the data thus collected. Wiser men than me have a hunch that the framers of the Regulations probably intended that the injury records should be made available to statisticians and veterinary epidemiologists who specialise in the study of patterns of disease. They may have intended that, but they didn’t put it on paper in as many words and as a result, while track vets carefully collect the facts and figures and promoters carefully store them, they are not available to anybody outside the ranks of the GBGB and for all we cannon fodder know may just be stashed somewhere gathering dust. A fat lot of use that is, you might think.
The members of the EFRACom panel that conducted the first five year review of the Regulations certainly thought so. In the report of their inquiry published on 25th February, referring to the Regulations they stated that “they did not stipulate that the injury records be published, but we believe that was the clear intention of introducing the need to keep them. We are concerned that although collection of injury data has been mandatory for five years there has been no move to put it to greater use.” Not too many prisoners being taken there then! Continuing in the same forthright mode, they reported that “the G.B.G.B. has stated that it is prepared to share with ‘responsible organisations’. However, the argument that injury data should not be made publicly available as it would lend weight to organisations that seek to ban racing is not conclusive” Driving this point forcefully home, they concluded that “if the statistics reflect a healthy welfare situation, there should be no public outcry in response to their publication”. It is hard to argue with them on that one. What can the powers-that-be usefully achieve by concealing injury statistics?
The “antis”, like the poor, will always be with us. To the diehards among their ranks one single dog splitting a web or breaking a dew claw in a year’s racing is one too many. Nothing short of the banning of our sport and the rehoming of every race dog in a pet home will get them off our backs. There is therefore little point in wasting much time arguing with these hard core guys. What is more important for the future of our industry is to persuade the ordinary decent bloke in the street who knows little about the greyhound game that, while a few injuries and even deaths are almost inevitable, the sport currently has a good record on greyhound welfare and is constantly striving to make that record even better still. The best way to convince the man on the Clapham omnibus of the justice of the industry’s case is for us insiders to clean up our act voluntarily long before we are forced into it and to do so transparently. The G.B.G.B may very well be doing a great job for greyhound welfare, but if they are doing so behind closed doors in smoke-filled rooms it may be hard to convince Joe Public that they are succeeding in so doing.
As it stands the Top Brass are concealing injury data not only from the “antis” but from industry insiders as well. Looking at the English greyhound racing industry once again through Irish eyes, I still find it hard to get used to the fact that dogs in the lowlier grades only race at the track to which their trainer is attached. Back home you can race any dog at any track providing that it has completed qualifying trials somewhere in the thirty-two counties, has raced or trialled over any distance at the track in question or has raced over the distance of the race in which you wish to enter it at any track. Trainers enter dogs at different tracks at different times in search of a track that suits the dog in question, or in search of better prize money or an easier race. There is always gossip and rumour to the effect that more dogs get injured at one track than another and some owners and trainers try to avoid racing at certain tracks for that very reason. It seems a reasonable guess that the injury data collected by the RCPA will also show that a greyhound is more likely to be injured when racing or trialling at one track than another.
Such is life. If trainers were free to enter their dogs where they chose they might vote with their feet and avoid those tracks that they perceive to be less safe, leaving the substandard tracks struggling to fill cards. The industry should face up to such challenges and try to put them right, rather than trying to hide the evidence and using trainers contracts’ to restrict their freedom to race dogs where they choose. Once welfare standards at every track have been raised to an acceptable level and systems put in place to monitor them and keep them at least at that level then and only then can we look the “antis” in the eye and tell them to have sex and travel.
