The greyhound racing industry has run its course

Cruelty can have shades of meaning for animals kept for profit or as pets, and greyhounds could be the only animal that sit in both camps. But they’ve been treated so cruelly in NSW that the greyhound racing industry has now run its course.

The people who oversee the increasingly culturally inappropriate, so-called sport have been accused of misleading the public about greyhound deaths, injuries and the thousands of old animals unable to find a home that end up in industrial kennels.

An exclusive report by the Herald’s chief reporter, Jordan Baker, revealed that the former chief veterinary officer at Greyhound Racing NSW, Alex Brittan, in an exit document to the independent regulator, the Greyhound Welfare and Integrity Commission (GWIC), described the treatment of racing greyhounds as barbaric and the industry as unsustainable.

Damningly, Brittan’s report included internal data that put the actual number of greyhound deaths in 2023 at 3384 – more than three times as many as the 970 deaths by euthanasia, natural causes or accidents that were publicly reported by the GWIC.

GRNSW chief executive Robert Macaulay resigned shortly after our report appeared, and Gaming and Racing Minister David Harris announced an inquiry. He has given the GRNSW board until Friday to show cause why members should not be stood down.

But the entire industry – administrators, owners, trainers and patrons – cannot escape responsibility for allowing the cruelty to persist. Eight years ago, the NSW greyhound industry got a second life when the Liberal premier, Mike Baird, tried to ban greyhound racing after a report by a retired High Court judge found the industry had “fundamental animal welfare issues, integrity and governance failings that cannot be remedied”. Baird was thwarted by a backlash from Labor and Nationals MPs, but he did impose new welfare standards and established the independent regulator, the GWIC.

Our report shows how the greyhound industry has blithely and pigheadedly failed to reform itself in line with community expectations, despite being given a lifeline back in 2016. When rumours of the Brittan document were circulating within the industry, GRNSW – which obtains a slice of NSW gambling taxes – bought full-page ads in newspapers, including this masthead, in which it thanked the public for its “best year ever”, and declared NSW had zero unnecessary euthanasia and a record rehoming of dogs.

In an email to senior members of the integrity commission, which was among the documents released to parliament on Tuesday, Macaulay described the communique as a “long and rambling dissertation”. Another document rejected claims that hundreds of deaths were being hidden, saying Brittan had misunderstood the figures.