A scathing report into greyhound racing in New South Wales has prompted the peak body’s CEO to resign and forced the state government to open an inquiry and threaten to sack the board.
The document, written by the former chief vet of Greyhound Racing NSW (GRNSW), Alex Brittan, alleges widespread animal abuse and persistent reporting and oversight failures.
GRNSW has said it takes concerns about animal welfare, integrity and rehoming very seriously and had ensured Brittan’s claims were thoroughly investigated, including by appointing former Victorian police commissioner Graham Ashton to review the document. GRNSW declined to comment for this story.
So what does Brittan’s report allege? Guardian Australia reviewed the document to identify the main claims.
Pushing dogs past the limit
Brittan alleged greyhounds were being raced at unsustainable levels resulting in high stress, injury and deaths on race tracks.
From 2022, GRNSW had tried to increase the number of dogs raced by paying trainers an allowance of $60 for every dog they brought to a race.
Brittan claimed this boosted injury rates because it encouraged some trainers to race greyhounds as often as possible, even when they had no chance of winning.
“This travel subsidy has had in my opinion, the greatest negative effect on race injury rates of any policy to date. It needs to be stopped or heavily amended immediately,” he wrote.
The report said the sheer number of dogs presenting at race tracks means race track vets were typically only able to spend 30 seconds checking each dog’s medical fitness to race.
It said greyhounds were sometimes left ignored in their trackside cages, putting them under immense stress that in some cases caused them to hurt themselves while clawing at their cage doors.
Two-thirds of greyhounds entering GRNSW’s rehoming program were so psychologically damaged after retiring from racing that they required significant medication or time in rehabilitation, Brittan claimed.
‘Trapped’ after retirement
After retiring, dogs who were supposedly being rehomed as pets were in fact left “trapped in the industry” because there were too many dogs to move on, the report said.
Half of the racing dogs that retired each year were not rehomed, leaving at least 8,000 and up to 13,000 greyhounds 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”.
Unusually high dog deaths
Death had become an alarmingly common solution to cutting the number of unwanted greyhounds, Brittan claimed, with dogs dying at unnaturally high rates.
One in five greyhounds in the industry died when they were less than five and half years old, which Brittan wrote was “significant higher than the norm”.
Reported deaths were commonly attributed to snake bites or to “idiopathic” or unclear causes but were not investigated, creating “a loophole that is open to being abused as a convenient method of de-stocking unwanted dogs from a property”.
There was at least one case where a GRNSW participant asked a local shooter to kill an unwanted dog, he alleged.
There are strict legal conditions on the euthanasia of greyhounds but Brittan alleged there were vets were known by the industry to facilitate high numbers of euthanasia.
Dog deaths unreported
Brittan alleged the industry’s independent watchdog, the Greyhound Welfare and Integrity Commission (GWIC), had opaquely and inaccurately reported the number of dogs that had died.
The report said participants were not reporting their dogs’ deaths to GWIC, breaching industry requirements. That meant GWIC reported only 970 deaths in the financial year 2022-23, despite its digital tracking system recording more than three times that number.
Brittan gave the example of one case where greyhound bodies and remains were allegedly found in freezers and a fire pit at a vet’s premises, but none of the deaths had been reported by owners.
He alleged there were additional thousands of young unregistered greyhounds and old greyhounds yet to record a race who were at high risk of dying without their deaths being reported.
Brittan’s verdict
Brittan ultimately alleged nothing had changed in the eight years since the industry was briefly shut down in 2016 over the scale of animal abuse.
“The industry continues to overproduce exhausted greyhounds that are no longer able to race,” he wrote.
“Greyhounds continue to die rather than be rehomed. Twice as many greyhounds die than are rehomed over the past four years [to June 2023].”
He alleged GRNSW was fighting “to ensure the survival of an industry that is failing to maintain the wellbeing and welfare of the greyhound lives on which is it built and depends on.”
But Brittan also blamed GWIC for leaving animal welfare concerns unaddressed.
“Those industry bodies charged with accountability and transparency are merely misrepresenting, underreporting and obfuscating the facts,” he wrote.
GWIC declined to comment as the matter was subject to ongoing investigations.
