Lisa White, who founded the Friends of the Hound charity after discovering how many racing greyhounds were killed each year, with canine friends at her property in northern NSW. Credit:Paul Harris

Once seen mostly on the racetrack, greyhounds are now seemingly everywhere in civilian life, thanks to re-homing schemes that have sprung up to counter cruelty and over-breeding.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size A group of the hounds that changed the course of Lisa White’s life are confined within her rural NSW home, awaiting our arrival. We drive into her yard expecting the sort of uproar large, territorial dogs usually turn on for strangers. Yet even when we step onto the verandah there are no barks or growls, only birdsong and silence. Are there really 10 greyhounds in there? I look through a window and see the dogs standing attentively in rows looking back at me, their mouths set in what appear to be polite smiles. When White opens the door, they glide out and flow silently around us like water around an obstacle, their warm bodies soft and pliable. “Most greyhounds have the calmest, sweetest natures,” says White. “Which is quite incredible considering what they’ve been through.” As she describes the origins of her rescue and fostering charity, Friends of the Hound (FOTH), a female called Molly leans against White on the couch and closes her eyes blissfully. Soon most of the dogs are doing what this famously “lazy” breed does best: sleeping soundly with their feet in the air, a lurk even young, healthy greyhounds indulge in for up to an astonishing 22 hours a day. An exception, on this morning, is a large white male who sidles by, then turns and gooses me vigorously with his crotch-high snout. “Whoa!” I cry, momentarily airborne. “What’s your name, big boy?” “That’s Willy,” says White, and we all crack up. Willy’s background is a lot less amusing than his party trick. Four years ago, he was among 19 half-starved former racing dogs rescued by White and her volunteers from a bush property where they lived with a deregistered trainer who dwelt among them in a humpy. “It was a horrendous situation,” she says. “The dogs were all feral, just living in paddocks with scars all over them from fighting.”


After being nursed back to health and assessed as potential pets in FOTH volunteer foster homes, most of the greyhounds were re-homed to live out their 10- to 14-year lifespans with typically devoted admirers of the breed. Willy, deeply traumatised, stayed for months at White’s property at Dunbible, near Murwillumbah in northern NSW, where one of her three daughters – Lacey, now 13 – spent hours a day leading him about and calming his fears. “She was very upset when we found him a new home,” says White. “But he came back here after three years because the owners couldn’t keep him anymore. He’s 10 now, so this is where he’ll stay.” Since 2003, when she started her not-for-profit rescue charity for racing industry discards, White and her members – whose territory extends from the ACT to south-east Queensland – have re-homed 2000 greyhounds, 800 of whom have passed through White’s weather-beaten cottage en route to their new lives as pets. Her determination to do something about the grim toll of greyhound “wastage” (as the euphemism goes) has cost White – who also works part-time in hospital administration – a lot of money and virtually all her spare time. Yet she remains frustrated by how few dogs are being re-homed compared to the numbers still being bred within the industry: “The 2000 we’ve helped doesn’t seem like a lot to me, because for decades the industry bred around 20,000 greyhounds a year, of which up to 17,000 a year were ‘wasted’ or killed. Those numbers have supposedly dropped now, but despite the industry’s adoption programs, there’s never enough homes for the unwanted dogs. And unless we stop racing them, there never will be.” No statistics on the number of greyhounds bred or put down annually are available from the industry’s independently managed state and territory jurisdictions. Greyhound racing in Australia and New Zealand is overseen by Greyhounds Australasia Ltd (GA), whose CEO – Cherie Nicholl – tells Good Weekend that GA is still “in the process of scoping a consistent national data framework” to provide figures for greyhound breeding and euthanasia. “The jurisdictions across the country are absolutely committed to the welfare of the greyhounds and their post-racing life is of the utmost importance. As is the lives of those dogs that do not make it to the track,” says Nicholl. White has been bewitched by greyhounds since her first encounter with a small female in a cage at a public pound in nearby Tweed Heads in 2002. She’d gone there with her family to join the Tweed Shire Council’s rescue and adoption group, Friends of the Pound, but couldn’t tear herself away from the winsome little hound watching her through the bars. “While I was admiring her, a pound worker said, ‘Oh, don’t look at that one, it’s only here to be put to sleep.’ ” Back then, when little was known about the breed, councils had a policy of not re-homing stray greyhounds, but White couldn’t get the doomed face of Zada (Arabic for “lucky one”) from her thoughts. Within days, she’d talked her way around the red tape and brought Zada home, where the gentle bitch mixed peacefully with the family menagerie of cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, chooks and horses. “That started me on my new path in life,” she says. “I did a lot of research into what was happening to greyhounds, and I was appalled.”


Loading When she started Friends of the Hound, the industry’s various state and territory Greyhound Adoption Programs (GAP) were in their infancy, and there was only one independent adoption group based in Western Australia. (Racing industry-controlled GAP organisations operate nationwide, except in Queensland, where GAP is part of the state-funded Queensland Racing Integrity Commission, and the ACT, where greyhound racing was banned in 2018.) Most [bred-for-racing dogs] have spent their whole lives in cages or kennels, so they have to learn how to live as human companions. Friends of the Hound's Lisa White. FOTH is now among the largest of about a dozen such independent organisations throughout the country. It gets most of its dogs from owners, breeders and trainers who are expected to seek homes for dogs that haven’t made it as racers, or have suffered injury, or reached their competitive use-by age of between two and five years. “They live with us until we can gauge their personalities, then at our volunteer foster homes until the right adoptive home becomes available,” explains White. “But most [bred-for-racing dogs] have spent their whole lives in cages or kennels, so they have to learn how to live as human companions.” As White sees it, a major problem with the adoption system is that the way greyhounds live as racers, or even potential racers, often makes them unsuitable as pets: “They’re kept in isolation, and encouraged to chase lures, so they’re often aggressive, with anxiety issues, and have to be retrained as pets. But some of them will never be suitable.” The breed, also known as sighthounds, pursues prey by sight rather than scent. The dogs have instinctive prey drive, which – heightened by lure training – can make them dangerous around smaller animals. “They’ll even chase a plastic bag blowing in the wind,” says White. “That’s why we’re so careful about assessing each animal and finding new owners who understand the breed. Because we don’t want headlines about a greyhound attacking someone’s little fluffy dog.”


But it’s pet cats that are most at risk. According to information posted online by the Greyhound Adoption Program in NSW, only 5 to 10 per cent of greyhounds are “cat tolerant” – and then only if the cat sharing a home with a greyhound lives entirely indoors. Moggies aside, GAP promotional material is upbeat about “retired” greyhounds being clean and sociable pets suitable for life in flats or apartments. They require little exercise, suffer few heritable diseases, mix well with other dogs if “introduced correctly”, are easy to feed and groom, and in most cases are “fit and healthy and in the prime of their lives”, despite some having “minor injuries which stop them being competitive on the track”. Until July 2019, all pet greyhounds in NSW had to be muzzled in public. The regulation has now been replaced by an Australia-wide “temperament test” conducted by GAP agencies. Dogs that pass the test are issued with green collars to denote their muzzle-free status. At White’s property, temperament testing is aided by Jack, a small but feisty three-legged Jack Russell terrier the family adopted years ago and jokingly dubbed “greyhound bait”. “We got him because we wanted to know how our greyhounds were with a little dog,” says White. “Jack has never been attacked by any of them. In fact, he’s the boss, and really gives them what for!” A lot of FOTH’s permanent homes stem from its promotions at community markets in NSW, Qld and the ACT. Volunteers erect gazebos where groups of greyhounds laze about, catching the attention of passers-by. “The only way to make a long-term change for these dogs is to get them out in public, where people can meet them and have their misconceptions put to rest,” White reasons. Able to see up to 1000 metres, greyhounds are believed to be the oldest pure-bred dog. On the surface, at least, the racing industry’s adopt-a-greyhound public relations push seems to be working. From bush towns to inner-city precincts across the nation, the spindly speedsters pop up everywhere: stepping out with their new human companions, taking their first car rides, reclining gracefully at outdoor cafes, or trekking about in groups organised by people whose only social connection is a shared love and fascination for the ancient breed.


Sighthounds, or “greys” as greyhounds were historically known, are part of a canine group (along with Irish wolfhounds, Afghans, Borzois, deerhounds, whippets and others) that hunt mostly by sight. Able to see up to 1000 metres, they’re believed to be the oldest pure-bred dog, with historical references linking them to Celtic Europeans as far back as 8AD. On the fly, they are the second-fastest four-legged creature after the cheetah, hitting speeds of 70km/h over short distances. Modern greyhound racing stems from the brutal sport of coursing (popular among the landed gentry after the dogs arrived here with the First Fleet), in which rabbits, hares, wallabies and other small victims were released, run down and torn to pieces by greyhounds, cheered on by gatherings of rum-charged “gentlemen”. Track racing using mechanised lures began in the US early last century. Britain, Europe and Australia took up wagered dog racing soon afterwards. Although officially banned, live baiting scandals persist wherever dog racing occurs. Australia’s most recent, in November last year, involved the suspension of three Victorian trainers allegedly using possums as live bait. But the biggest shake-up of the industry in Australia came after a joint investigation into greyhound racing by the ABC’s Four Corners, together with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in 2015. This led to a Special Commission of Inquiry in NSW, which found that up to 20 per cent of trainers in that state still practised live baiting. The commission also found that over-breeding and the consequent euthanising of dogs meant the industry had failed to meet community expectations that it was ethical and humane. “The industry has failed to address the issue of wastage successfully, and [due to its established economics] appears unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future,” the commission noted. Loading According to the RSPCA’s website, the dog over-supply is “exacerbated by financial incentives for breeding, appearance fees and the lure of prize money … statistics on the fate of unwanted greyhounds are not published by the industry, but based on the available information … between 13,000 and 17,000 healthy greyhounds are euthanised by the greyhound racing industry each year in Australia.” Yet although such welfare concerns have led to the decline of commercial dog racing across the world (it’s now illegal in 40 states in the US, where tracks continue to close), Australia’s industry, easily the largest of the eight countries where racing occurs, continues to thrive. It reportedly still attracts about $4 billion a year in bets, mostly from punters who rarely visit a track but bet by phone or online. Backed financially by state and territory governments, it remains self-regulated and is fiercely defended by industry sources, politicians, political lobbyists and punters themselves, as former NSW Liberal premier Mike Baird – whose popularity plummeted as a consequence of trying to ban the sport in his state in 2016 – can attest.

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