by Sue Osborne, Coalition for the Protection of Greyhounds
Imagine you are walking down the street, minding your own business, enjoying the scenery and the calming presence of your greyhound at the end of your leash, when a ute suddenly pulls up next to you and a man jumps out.
Every nerve in your body goes into overdrive. Greyhounds are many wonderful things, but they are not good guard dogs.
“Do you want another one?” the man says, nodding his head towards his ute. You see a brindle head leaning over the side tray, gentle brown eyes on you. “I’ve got another five like that at home. Don’t know what to do with them. Shall I get him out for you to have a look at?”
You realise the man is an owner from the racing industry trying to give away a greyhound, as he doesn’t know what to do with it.
This actually happened to a Coalition for the Protection of Greyhound member in Queensland, and other greyhound owners may have experienced something similar.
There are simply too many greyhounds being bred, and owners are desperate to get rid of their dogs. The industry-run Greyhounds as Pets (GAPs) and volunteer rehoming bodies are overwhelmed. You may also see greyhounds advertised for free on Gumtree or similar websites.
Young greyhounds face an uncertain future despite numerous government inquiries into the racing industry. The McHugh inquiry in 2016 found 50% of greyhounds of no value to the industry were killed – at least 48,000 dogs (but it could have been as high as 68,000 according to the RSPCA) were killed between 2003-2015.
Measures were put in place after this inquiry, such as the foundation of GAPS, the industry rehoming program, however the industry is still breeding almost three times as many dogs as its GAPs can rehome.
Damning document by former industry vet
In 2024 a document written by Greyhound Racing NSW (GRNSW) former chief vet Alex Brittan, alleged that two-thirds of greyhound deaths had been excluded from official reports and that thousands of dogs recorded as being rehomed as pets were kept in industrial kennels
Guardian Australia reported on the issue: “Half of the racing dogs that retired each year were not rehomed, leaving at least 8000 and up to 13,000 greyhounds [remember these figures are only for NSW] to be “shuffled through the industry to paid commercial kennels”, Brittan wrote.
“He claimed the industry’s central solution to the enormous number of dogs left in retirement limbo was to artificially inflate the number being moved on.
“GRNSW in their rehoming figures included dogs whose owners were only receiving payments to prepare them for a potential future move to pet life.
“The greyhound goes to the vet, gets de-sexed, is picked up by its owner and taken back to its home, where it waits for a rehoming that will likely never come,” Brittan wrote.
“The backlog of waiting dogs “will never be rehomed and will die within the industrial facilities that they were born and raced in”.
“When Brittan raised his concerns with GRNSW management, he alleges they said, “if we can just ignore the problem long enough, it will die”. The Guardian July 2024.
Breeders are tempted by the chance of getting their hands on large prize monies, often inflated by state government grants, and breeding incentive schemes. The industry is now breeding almost three times more dogs than it can rehome. With no national database to track their fate, no one knows what happens to many greyhounds
The Coalition for the Protection of Greyhounds (CPG) and the Australian Veterinary Association has been calling for a cap on breeding, as well as lifetime monitoring, for several years, but so far no government or racing body has acted.
Acute problem in Queensland
Only since 2024 have there been any rules in Queensland about breeding, rehoming and euthanasia. Anyone in the industry could label their dog ‘unrehomable’ without giving a reason and kill it.
Due to loopholes in the legislation, this practice continues. This year 14 Queensland greyhounds were euthanised as ‘unrehomable’ in the first six months of 2025, compared to three in Victoria and one in NSW.
Dogs could also be sent to universities (principally the University of Queensland) and vet practices for research and training. In the last five years, about a thousand dogs in Queensland have disappeared this way.
Thankfully, due to pressure from CPG and the wider animal welfare community, the new Queensland rehoming rules prohibited greyhounds being sent to universities or research labs unless the agency had rehoming as its primary function. University of Queensland failed to meet this condition.
Rehoming straight from racing is failing greyhounds
As the industry rehoming arm, GAPs are part of the taxpayer-funded racing industry yet they only take dogs they consider easy to rehome. Despite this, they routinely euthanase dogs as “unrehomable” and there are long waitlists across the country including up to two years in Victoria.
Greyhounds need time with experienced foster families before they can go to their forever home, to give them a chance to get used to pet life after living in a cage without any socialisation while they are racing.
That’s why our friend at the beginning of this story, offering a dog to a stranger on the street, is such a problem. Dogs that come straight out of racing and into a family home often fail and get sent to a pound or disappear out of the system because they have not had the careful training and rehabilitation offered by a rehoming charity.
The CPG member encouraged the owner to try and find his dogs a place with a rehoming charity. The experience left her shocked and more determined than ever to campaign for better oversight of greyhound racing.
People offering free greyhounds on the street or online indicates there is a problem that needs to be fixed urgently.
Image source: Farm Transparency Project