by Warren Young, Coalition for the Protection of Greyhounds
Seven News Riverina has recently reported that the planned closure of the track at Wagga Wagga has been overturned, despite two greyhounds being killed in 10 days.
The Federal Member for Riverina Michael McCormack MP stated that “there will always be unfortunate mishaps because that’s just sport.” He said that you can go to the local footy field and see “players sometimes breaking their legs.”
There are two issues from these comments. First, there is a massive difference between a football player breaking a leg and a greyhound being euthanised at the track. The occurrence of breaking legs in football is very rare, and won’t happen twice in 10 days. But if it does happen, the player can fully recover after a period of rehabilitation. For a racing greyhound, a broken leg is often a “catastrophic” injury, resulting in the dog being euthanised on track or shortly after. Thirty greyhounds were killed on Australian tracks in June and July this year. Imagine if 30 football players were killed in” unfortunate mishaps” in two months!
The second issue is the acceptance of greyhound deaths as just being part of participating in the “sport”. Whether greyhound racing can be considered as a legitimate sport is debatable, but that’s another story. The comments of Michael McCormack reflect the attitude that greyhound deaths are unfortunate, but acceptable. A published survey of industry participants confirms this attitude as one trainer put it: “it’s terrible when you’ve got to put them down but we’re okay with it.”
So, what is an acceptable number of greyhound deaths?
About 10 years ago a TAC campaign was shown on TV where a man was told there were 249 people that died on Victorian roads, and he was asked what he thought was a more acceptable number. His initial answer was 70 until he was shown what a group of 70 people looked like including his own family. Showing emotion about the thought of his family being killed, he changed his answer to a road toll of zero.
This example shows that when people disassociate themselves from the human, and only consider the road toll as a statistic, they accept the trauma associated with death. The same happens in greyhound racing where owners and trainers tolerate dog deaths because it’s an inevitable part of their hobby and the dogs are only commodities. For politicians, their acceptance of the greyhound death toll is based on their attraction to the perception of economic activity related to gambling.