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We advocate on all animal protection and exploitation issues, including experimentation, factory farming, rodeos, breeders and traveling animal acts.

Animal Defenders of Westchester
P.O. Box 205
Yonkers, NY 10704

Letters

Dog Racing: Cruel Business

published in
The Hartford Courant, Letters 9/5/04

The Aug. 26 article, "When Dog Days Can Be Pleasant" (Life section) was nothing more than a tasteless advertisement for one of the most cruel and despicable of industries.

The greyhound racing industry is inherently cruel, and the dogs suffer horribly from the day they are born on the breeding farm, to the training farm, in transport, and at racetracks. Muzzled greyhounds are often forced to live in crates for 18-20 hours per day.

The Greyhound Protection League www.greyhounds.org  has said the industry kills 20,000 to 25,000 healthy greyhounds each year because they are unable to run fast enough. Every week at tracks around the country, truckloads of failed or injured greyhounds are killed or sent to research laboratories.

Fortunately, there is moral progress. As the public becomes more and more educated about what goes on behind the scenes, greyhound racing is losing popularity.  It is already illegal in 34 states.  The two Connecticut racetracks are straggling to survive.

Idaho Governor, Phil Batt, said it best, "Dog racing depends upon selecting a few highly competitive dogs out of a large group. It hardly seems worth it to me to go through that process of breeding and killing the ones that can't compete, just to have the sport."

Readers can educate themselves about this issue by going to www.greyhounds.org . I urge the public to not support this barbaric business.

Barbara I. Biel
 

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