Greyhounds mass murder in Ireland revealed

Reports by Greyhound Action Ireland (GAI) have revealed the shocking level of death generated by the murderous greyhound racing industry in Ireland. The campaigners show that:

3,300 (57%) of the racing greyhounds born in 2021 remaining on the island of Ireland and no longer racing are dead.

The oldest of those dogs would be five and a half, the youngest four and a half.

For those born in the following year, the figures are even more disgraceful:

2,660 (74%) of the racing greyhounds born in 2022 remaining on the island of Ireland and no longer racing are dead.

The oldest of those dogs would be four and a half, the youngest three and a half.

Greyhounds typically have a life expectancy of around 14 years. The report follows questions GAI submitted to the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, enquiring about the status of non-coursing greyhounds for each year.

Quoted by fellow campaigners Ban Blood Sports, GAI spokesperson Nuala Donlon said:

The Irish state is essentially sponsoring the killing of dogs on an industrial scale. This would not be tolerated were it happening to any other breed of dog. It should not be tolerated in the case of greyhounds.

Greyhounds facing cruelty

The sponsoring Donlon refers to is the over €386 million robbed from Irish taxpayers since 2001 to pay for this barbarism. GAI report how the supposed economic benefits of this scrounging have been greatly exaggerated by dodgy accounting by the sport’s administrator Rásaíocht Con Éireann (Greyhound Racing Ireland).

The murderers claimed their killing spree dressed up as a ‘sport’ is:

…worth [€]132 million annually to the Irish economy, and sustains 4,500 full-time and part-time jobs.

However, Preferred Results Consultancy Company saw through this shit, and determined that there were “serious flaws” in Greyhound Racing Ireland’s (GRI) claims. Their analysis showed that GRI:

…exaggerated the value of the industry to the economy by €68 million (238%).

Dogs in the Six Counties (outside GRI jurisdiction) were included, along with those already exported outside Ireland.

GRI’s fuckery with figures extends to their traceability system, introduced by GRI to track dogs following an RTÉ documentary in 2019 that revealed:

…as many as 6,000 dogs were being culled each year for not being fast enough.

As the Irish Examiner points out, this system was:

…meant to bring transparency to the entire industry but campaigners now say the statistics are potentially meaningless.

GRI did not dispute the enormous death toll figures, however.

The Irish Examiner report revealed an enormous discrepancy of 1,613 for 2021 between its own race management system and its Rásaíocht Con Éireann’s Traceability System (RCETS). This is for numbers of greyhounds raced or trialled throughout the calendar year.

Dodgy tracking system keeps murky business opaque

The two systems are not integrated, and GRI did not respond to the Examiner’s questions on why this was the case. RCETS also relies on greyhound owners self-reporting on the current status of their dog(s). Together, this picture looks like something designed to maintain opacity around the horrific so-called sport, concealing the cruelty inherent to it.

GAI’s Donlon said:

The decision not to use that data [from the race management system] to update or validate RCETS was not a technical limitation, it was a design choice.

869 dogs have lost their lives during races in the last six years. Then there’s the figures for what the industry grotesquely refers to as ‘wastage’. The RTÉ documentary used a report that showed:

5,987 greyhounds which were available to race were culled each year. The reasons for the cull were broken down as follows – “those who failed to produce qualifying times”(2,673); “failure to produce desired entry level times” (1,989) and an “unacceptable decline in performance” (1,326).

Dogs have been found in mass graves, having been shot in the head or mutilated. Other horror stories exist, such as the case of:

…a pregnant greyhound, who had been at the point of giving birth, [that] was brutally killed and dumped in a cemetery in Clonmel. The Irish Mirror reported that a woman visiting her mother’s grave at St Patrick’s cemetery in the town was shocked to discover the animal “beaten to death”.

The massive death figures revealed by Greyhound Action Ireland show the continued murderous nature of an industry that claims to have cleaned up its act. As Nuala Donlon says, the recent stats show the opposite is true:

The industry’s own figures prove beyond doubt that nothing has changed in Irish greyhound racing – thousands of young dogs are still being killed every year!

Featured image via the Canary