The ‘starts’ concept – fudging the stats

Around the world, the greyhound racing industry uses the concept of ‘starts’ to present its injury and death statistics.

This is done for a reason – the starts concept is an effective way to understate the industry’s record of harm to racing dogs. How? The ‘starts’ concept is misleading as it attempts to account for all injuries sustained in the racing period, yet fails to acknowledge:

  • the total number of individual dogs raced and
  • cases of multiple injuries.
On this basis, the starts concept underestimates the injury risk. A simpler and more appropriate injury rate would be the total number of dogs which sustain an injury as a percentage of total dogs raced.

This would provide a more holistic view of injury amongst a population. The problem is that the dog racing industry doesn’t publish information about the total number of dogs raced.

On-track injuries and deaths have not changed significantly over the past five years and in some cases there has been an increase.

So what’s the solution? Reject industry spin and use our simple, straightforward data here – 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024.

For more detailed information about the starts concept, see here.