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Articles Killing field of the dog racing industry Published in the Sunday Times,
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2272307_1,00.html The Sunday Times July 16, 2006 Killing field of the dog racing industry - Daniel Foggo Another day, another death: this man slaughters greyhounds on an
industrial scale DAVID SMITH met the owners of the two greyhounds at his garden gate and
pocketed �10 from each as he took hold of the makeshift leads. The animals appeared sprightly and alert as if they hoped they might soon
be allowed off the lead for a run. But seconds later two sharp reports rang
out. They had been killed. Anyone who had worked in an abattoir would have recognised the sounds as
the discharging of a bolt gun, a weapon that fires a metal bar with enough
force to smash the toughest skull. The dogs emerged lifeless and limp in Smith�s bloodied wheelbarrow. He
dumped them in a freshly dug hole on one side of his one-acre garden before
covering the grave with earth using a mechanical digger. Smith contemplated his garden for a moment with a look of satisfaction.
On the other side of his plot his lettuces were coming up nicely. The episode, on Wednesday, was captured on film by a photographer for The
Sunday Times. It was repeated again the next day, this time with greyhounds
emerging from a white van and a silver Ford Mondeo before disappearing into
Smith�s killing shed. It was a scene that has been repeated regularly in this secluded corner
of the seaside town of Seaham, in Co Durham � a slaughter business that can
be exposed for the first time today after a Sunday Times investigation. Smith�s unofficial abattoir and graveyard have quietly serviced the
greyhound racing industry in the north of Britain for about 15 years.
Calculations by this newspaper suggest that over that period at least 10,000
dogs have been killed and buried in the plot at the back of his house.
Before Smith, his father, now 81, provided a similar service. According to a dog track insider, the trade has been a secret that
greyhound trainers and owners have been keen to keep. �Only doing two dogs a
day is a bad day for him. It is not unheard of for him to do around 40 a day
and if anyone ever digs up that garden it will be like the killing fields,�
we were told. �He has made a mint out of it. �This service is for the licensed trainers who have 50 or 60 dogs in
their kennels. The greyhounds are used for the afternoon races that appear
on television. These dogs have made a lot of people a lot of money and they
don�t deserve to be shot in the head. It is a scandal that the industry
should be ashamed of.� Campaigners have long suspected that such an operation was being run
somewhere in Britain but have never been able to pinpoint its location. The
RSPCA says about 12,000 greyhounds a year disappear and are unaccounted for.
Greyhounds have only a short racing life. Once they reach 3� to 5 years
old � out of a natural lifespan of about 12 to 14 years � they are
considered too slow to compete. Some go to new homes as pets, in accordance
with the official policy of the National Greyhound Racing Club (NGRC), the
industry�s governing body. Many others simply vanish. Debbie Rothery, who runs a greyhound sanctuary in West Yorkshire, said
thousands of greyhounds were disposed of each year under the noses of the
NGRC. �It is a sordid secret but nobody wants to know and it is about time
it was exposed,� she said. �The RSPCA have told me they have not got time to
pursue greyhound abusers and parliament does not do anything because they
are making too much money from the industry.� Greyhound racing is big business, attracting 3.5m people to its tracks
each year, with millions more watching races on television. Every year �2.5
billion is bet on the sport and about �70m goes to the government in tax.
In recent years greyhound racing has upgraded its public image, helped by
regular television coverage of meetings and by celebrity owners such as
Freddie Flintoff, the England cricketer. One is Pauline Harrison, a greyhound owner from Barnsley, who met evasion
and lies when she tried to find out what had happened to her race- winning
dog, Stormy Silver. He was five years old when she decided to retire him in
2002. Terry Dee, a registered trainer attached to Kinsley stadium, a
licensed track near Pontefract, West Yorkshire, offered to find him a new
home. �He took him off me but when I tried to find out how Stormy Silver was
doing in his new home a few weeks later Dee kept putting me off. In the end
I rang the retirement home and they said they hadn�t had any dogs from
Kinsley. �Then Dee said he�d lied and in fact he�d given him to a woman but it
took weeks to get the number. In the end, I spoke to this supposed new owner
and she said he was doing fine. But Stormy Silver had a toe missing and when
I asked her which foot it was on she didn�t know. She said she would call
back but after that the number became unobtainable.� The owners of some of the 52 other dogs entrusted to Dee also want to
know where they went. After they complained, Dee was brought before the NGRC
and said he had given the dogs away at motorway service stations but had not
kept records. He was stripped of his trainer�s licence but the former owners still did
not know what had happened to their dogs. The suspicion is that Dee, who
died several months ago, took them to Smith. The industry insider said:
�Everyone knows the dogs went there. The inquiry swept it under the table;
once Dee was no longer a licensed trainer they had effectively washed their
hands of him.� When informed of her dog�s fate by The Sunday Times last week, Harrison
said: �It is horrific but I had come to suspect that something like this had
happened.� The Sunday Times began its investigation after a tip-off from a racing
insider who also felt it was time to expose and end the practice. A
reporter, posing as a greyhound owner who wanted to dispose of his dogs,
rang Smith, whose wife Maureen answered the phone and asked what he wanted.
�It�s about some dogs,� said the reporter and offered to call back. She
interrupted and said in a matter-of-fact tone: �You want to put some dogs
down, do you? Half past nine in the morning, down by the garden gate.� Every
morning? �Every morning, barring a Sunday,� she said. Last week the reporter turned up at the Smiths� business just as two
other dog owners, a man in jeans and a baseball cap and a woman in a quilted
waistcoat were leaving together in a powder-blue van. The plot of land where the slaughtered greyhounds are buried is on a
secluded plateau just below the Smiths� large redbrick dormer bungalow.
Nearby is a stream into which the residues of decaying dogs could leach,
although it was dried up last week. As Smith emerged from the shed where he had just ended the lives of the
two dogs, the reporter told him that he had eight greyhounds he wanted put
down. Smith, who at no point asked why he wanted them dead, indicated that
that was no problem as long as he hurried up as he had to get back to his
work as a builders� merchant. He bemoaned the fact that many of his customers balked at paying his
�10-per-death fee. �When you think it�s 60 or 70 quid at the vet, what am I
gonna do? I�ll be honest with you, I was thinking of putting it up,� he
said. �If some hassle us (over) 10 quid I am gonna put it up to �15. Don�t
hassle us for a discount � at 10 quid I�m doing it for nothing. �I am doing a service because the council and everyone who comes here,
the RSPCA . . . begged us not to pack in because if I pack in there will be
dogs all over the streets. He continued complaining, saying that he found the endless killing �a
hassle�. �I�ve done it for that many years, and my father done it before me and
I�ve done it and I�m not really bothered. If I had to pack in tomorrow I�d
pack in. It�s the hassle. For what? For what I make out of it?� When the
reporter suggested that he might run out of room to bury the dogs, Smith
pointed towards the far corner of the plot and said: �It takes me about
three years to get across there and by the time I get across I can start
here again and there�s only a few bones left so it doesn�t worry us.� The RSPCA denied having any record of meeting Smith. A spokesman said that such killing was unjustified and unnecessary,
although not necessarily illegal. Since 1997, anyone can own a bolt gun to kill animals without a licence
but can be prosecuted if the animals are put down inhumanely. The RSPCA put down 1,045 dogs last year for non-medical reasons but
insists that it is done only as a last resort once all other options have
been exhausted. �This is a sad reflection on the greyhound racing industry,
which should be cleaning up its act,� said Steve Cheetham, the RSPCA�s
veterinary spokesman. �It is imperative that the industry finally admits there is a problem and
works with welfare organisations to look at ways of tackling this as a
matter of urgency.� Alistair McLean, chief executive of the NGRC, said that the industry
helped to fund the retirement of about 3,000 of the 10,000 dogs that stop
racing at its 30 registered tracks each year. But although they ask their
trainers to confirm what happens to dogs after they retire, making exacting
checks is difficult. �Our policy is clear, which is that we would wish the greyhound to be
suitably rehomed. Greyhounds make great pets. It is absolutely against our
rules to use someone like this,� McLean said. Clarissa Baldwin, chief
executive of the Dogs Trust, said: �One of our very big fights with the
industry is that they have no idea what is going on in their �sport�.� When
confronted, Smith denied any knowledge of killing dogs but later said he was
doing it only to �do society a favour� and gave the proceeds to charity. He
claimed that most of the dogs were sick or injured. He refused to estimate
how many dogs he had put down and said that some weeks he did not kill any.
�But I am stopping it now,� he insisted. Run into the ground Many greyhounds are kept in cramped conditions for much of their lives
and are sometimes required to run several races a week. There have been persistent allegations that some are doped to slow them
down so that bookmakers will offer better odds next time they run. An industry insider said: �There are many ways to do that � excessive
feeding before a race or giving it beta blockers. To speed it up you give it
cocaine, which works in seconds.� Critics claim that trainers can get round
drug tests. Three-quarters of the greyhounds racing in Britain are born in Ireland,
where breeding and exporting them is a big enterprise. �The dogs in the afternoon fixtures are just made to run, run run,� said
the insider. �Then, when they go lame or get too old and lose a bit of
speed, they are just disposed of.� Welfare bill loophole The government set up the Greyhound Welfare Working Group � made up of
the sport�s various official bodies together with groups such as the RSPCA
and the Dogs Trust � last year to advise it on its animal welfare bill,
which is likely to become law later this year or in early 2007. However, despite much parliamentary debate, the bill will not make any
specific provision for greyhounds and the group has been told that they will
be covered only by secondary legislation. According to a draft drawn up by Defra, the environment ministry, this is
likely to state that �where destruction is inevitable, greyhounds must be
euthanased humanely by the intravenous injection of a suitable drug
administered under the direct supervision of a veterinary surgeon�. Maureen Purvis, of Greyhounds UK, a pressure group that gave evidence to
a House of Commons select committee regarding the new bill, said: �We wanted
the tracks to come under the jurisdiction and inspection of the local
authorities. The industry has had 80 years to regulate itself and it plainly
is not working.� Fair Use Notice: This document may contain
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