Soft penalties for abuse

Published research shows most Australians feel strongly that penalties for animal abuse are too low.

This also applies to greyhound racing, but the dog racing industry constantly hands out a mere slap on the wrist to its members. For example:

Although life bans exist in theory, they are rarely used by greyhound racing industry bodies and only when the crimes are horrendous. Even then, serious offenders banned in Australia sometimes get a job elsewhere. For example:

Worse still, when a dog racing industry participant is banned for life, there’s no longer any incentive for them to pay the fines levied upon them. Consequently, the racing industry announces big fines which it knows it will never be able to collect, but which will give the public and the media the impression that it is policing wrongdoers.
 

About industry penalties

It’s also not easy to find information about greyhound racing offence investigations and penalties on the internet. We’ve listed where they can be found for each state racing body here:

For more detail on each state racing body’s lax penalty system, scroll down to CPG’s state regulatory reports here.

Penalties are different in each state so it is difficult to compare them nationally. There are also different levels of transparency, e.g., information about Queensland offences is only available for six months, after which it is removed.

See also Uproar over dog trainer’s ‘soft’ penalty, The Age (Melbourne, Australia), Timna Jacks