Greyhound racing was then as it is now, the small time. It happens out of sight and out of mind, attended by none of the glamour of thoroughbred racing. Even for those who follow it, it is mostly about the punt and only a little about the dogs. It is why some of the barbaric practices exposed by Four Corners last year and the McHugh inquiry in NSW this year have been allowed to flourish. Our trainer all those years ago had no pretensions, and only a handful of greyhounds, and I presumed he was honest and humane, but I wouldn't really have known. I only ever visited his ramshackle Gippsland kennels once.
This week, greyhound racing emerged blinking and shuffling into public consciousness when NSW Premier Mike Baird banned it in his state. Baird called the findings of the McHugh report “chilling, confronting, horrific”. These included live baiting and the slaughter of healthy dogs no longer able – or never able – to race. Someone put the figure at 68,000 over the past 10 years in NSW alone. On ABC radio on Friday morning, veteran vet Ted Humphreys, who considers himself to be a thorn in the side of the greyhound industry, said that he was euthanising 10 a week himself.
Oddly enough, Humphreys said that exposure already had acted as its own justice system. He said the incidence of cruelty and mistreatment in NSW had reduced by a factor of 10 in a year; everyone was running scared. He was now putting down barely one dog a week. His solution would have been even tighter regulation, but not a ban. In Victoria, the state government and greyhound racing authorities were quick to issue releases detailing how they had already conducted inquiries, and how strictly policed the sport was here, and how even more exhaustive measures were in train. Reading them, you would think greyhound racing in Victoria was so clean you could eat off it.
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