How Irish dog racers muzzle humane critics
SALLINS, County Kildare–– Greyhound racing issues in Ireland converge on the People’s Animal Welfare Society, halfway between Dublin and the Newbridge Greyhound Racing Track, just a few miles beyond at Naas. Greyhound breeding, training, and boarding are big business right in the neighborhood.

PAWS founder Deirdre Hethering-ton, 73, is among the most prominent critics of the Irish greyhound industry.
Yet PAWS is also increasingly reliant on funding from both the Irish government and the Irish Greyhound Board, reputedly made available as part of a co-optive strategy to distract opposition by rehoming a relative handful of the greyhounds who are bred to race.

Deirdre Hetherington with spaniel pups (Kim Bartlett)

Many of the PAWS dogs are boarded with a prominent local greyhound racer.

Hetherington operates PAWS from her home, Sallins Castle, built to withstand armed foes.

Some Irish tourism web sites allege that Sallins Castle, later known as Sallins Lodge, no longer stands. In truth, it is well-preserved, though disguised with a stucco façade, and is almost entirely still used according to the original Norman plan. Hetherington started PAWS in 1996, formally incorporating in February 1997, by simply renovating the ancient stables and kennels already on the site, and putting them back to use.

Built soon after the mid-12th century Norman conquest of Ireland, a century after the 1066 Norman conquest of England, Sallins Castle was in essence a fortified farmhouse for the knights of Sallins, who ruled the nearby village for most of 800 years. Now a bustling Dublin suburb, Sallins throughout that time had a human population always recorded within a few dozen of 500.

(Kim Bartlett)

A moated keep with twin half-round towers flanking the portcullis faced the river road, the direction from which attack was most likely. The upper floors of the keep housed the knights and their families. The lower floor housed their servants.

At the back of the keep stood a two-story stable, with an armory in between. On the ground level were the horses. Above was a loft, defended by loopholes, with a pitched roof to keep firebrands out of the hay.

Like most Norman castles, Sallins Castle was not designed to withstand a prolonged siege. The strategy, if attacked, was for most of the residents to put up the best fight they could, while riders or runners slipped out the back way to fetch help from the next castle, typically 10 to 20 miles distant along the main toll roads.

For the knights of Sallins, that meant Dublin, 18 miles east.

Huguenots exiled from France in the 16th century bought the Sallins keep, probably by then abandoned, and rebuilt it into a more comfortable house, after the style of French chateaus, by opening windows through the Norman walls, filling most of the moat to keep down insects, and completely replacing the wooden interior.

The best-remembered residents of Sallins Castle and the neighborhood arrived in the 18th century, including the author Richard Brooke, who shared Sallins Lodge with his brother and their families for a few years early in the century; General Samuel Holt, who occupied the castle during and after the 1798 rebellion; and Theobald Wolfe Tone, instigator of the rebellion.

A resident of Sallins village, not the castle, Tone is buried at nearby Bodens-town. Poet Thomas Davis made the graveyard a nationalist shrine by erecting a stone to Tone’s memory in 1843.

The Sallins Castle stable has probably housed greyhounds and other dogs for as long as it has existed. Norman knights typically kept a hunting pack in an otherwise unoccupied horse stall. The stable appears to have been renovated only twice, by the Hugonauts, who built the present stalls, and by Hetherington, who added some tile walls and floors. Eventually Hetherington also converted the former servants’ quarters into dog housing, and turned the outbuildings into kennels. The onetime gardens became runs.

Raising an annual budget of about $150,000 per year, assisted by family and friends, Hetherington has ambitions of replacing the admittedly dilapidated, cold, wet, drafty medieval animal quarters with a state-of-the-art adoption palace. But that will take an influx of new funding from somewhere, perhaps a major bequest.

Hetherington claims to have adopted out more than 7,000 dogs since starting PAWS, 70% of them adults. Many were cast-offs from the Newbridge racetrack.

“We are the only animal rescue in Ireland currently taking greyhounds from the state-run dog pounds, and one of the few taking lurchers,” or greyhound-mix hunting dogs, Hetherington says.

“All of the greyhounds are ex-racers, who have been taken to the pounds to be destroyed, usually at about two years of age,” Hetherington continues. “As it is nearly impossible to rehome these dogs in Ireland, we have to hold them until we can get them to the United Kingdom or the U.S.,” where many are rehomed by Louise Coleman of Greyhound Friends, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

The PAWS adoption record is outstanding, but has a more problematic side.

PAWS’ work has been subsidized since 2001 by grants from the Irish government. Officially, there is no direct link between subsidies for animal welfare and efforts to counter activist criticism of the greyhound industry. Yet PAWS began getting help after the Dublin-based Alliance for Animal Rights and the American/European Greyhound Alliance embarrassed agriculture minister Joe Walsh with an August 2000 protest outside Leinster House, seat of the Irish Parliament.

The Irish SPCA followed up in 2001 with an investigative report detailing cruel treatment of greyhounds exported to Spain.

As the Irish greyhound export issue gained global attention, the aid increased–– some of it coming directly from the industry.

“During 2004 we hugely expanded our greyhound rescue,” daughter Gina Hetherington explained in a recent PAWS newsletter. “The Irish Greyhound Board has committed to pay kenneling fees and neutering costs for registered greyhounds in our care.”

Most of the PAWS greyhounds are boarded with a racing trainer whose large commercial kennel and cattery stands on the same road, a mile beyond Sallins Castle.

The PAWS greyhound rescue program thereby helps indirectly to keep at least one trainer in business, while helping the Irish government to pretend that the usual fate of ex-racing dogs is humane retirement.

But PAWS is scarcely the only Irish animal welfare charity to receive government and industry subsidies for finding homes for ex-racing greyhounds. The funding, a fraction of the $69 million euros spent to subsidize racing in 2004, is reputedly liberally distributed among animal rescue societies.

Neither is PAWS the only Irish animal welfare charity to board dogs with greyhound trainers. No one has been more outspokenly critical of the greyhound industry over the years than American/European Greyhound Association and Limerick Animal Welfare cofounder Marion FitzGibbon, for example. FitzGibbon is also a board member of the Avalon Greyhound Sanctuary. Her former tenure as Irish SPCA board president coincided with the most aggressive phase of ISPCA greyhound activism.

Yet among the boarders housing dogs for FitzGibbon is prominent racing trainer and transporter Donal Croke.
“Croke has just built new kennels and has big paddocks for the dogs to run in,” FitzGibbon told supporters. “He has good connections in England, and will try to find homes for greyhounds in the south of England, as well as promoting them in the southeast of Ireland.”

FitzGibbon and virtually every other Irish animal advocate whom ANIMAL PEOPLE interviewed readily agreed that greyhound racing is among the most urgent animal welfare issues in Ireland––but most also asserted that the racing industry is much too strong to confront directly, and that working with it is inevitable.

Ironically, FitzGibbon and others quickly acknowledge the longtime support of Greyhound Friends founder Louise Coleman. Outspokenly critical of both greyhound racing and U.S. organizations that accept aid from the industry, allegedly at the price of silence, Coleman began Greyhound Friends in 1983 precisely because, as she put it, she refused to be muzzled.

Major U.S. promoters were then still building new greyhound tracks. Now tracks close every year, not to be replaced, and most of the survivors augment live racing with telecasts, slot machines, and poker tables.

The Irish greyhound industry is also declining––but about a generation more slowly.

As of 1994, according to the Irish Greyhound Studbook, Ireland bred 25,000 greyhounds per year. About 11,000 greyhounds per year were retired from racing, of whom about 4,000 were killed, according to the Irish SPCA. Approximately 10,000 greyhounds were exported, chiefly to race and hunt in Spain. Most of the dogs sold to Spain were believed by greyhound advocates to have been killed at the end of the hunting or racing season, to be replaced with more dogs from Ireland the next year.

By 2003, only 20,000 greyhounds were whelped in Ireland, according to a report called Grey-hound Hell, jointly published by the Irish SPCA and the Royal SPCA of Great Britain. As the export market had dwindled, following a collapse of greyhound racing at Spanish tourist venues, the Irish SPCA believed that about 14,000 Irish greyhounds were killed as surplus in 2003, more than triple the volume of killing when exports were strong.

13,278 greyhounds were registered during the first half of 2005, according to FitzGibbon. Since breeding and registry mostly come early in the year, the 2005 total may represent another drop in greyhound whelping.
Yet the complete context shows little to celebrate. The three most recently published annual totals of dogs killed in Irish shelters were 24,000, 20,000, and 18,000. The numbers are dropping due to the success of pet sterilization programs such as SpayWeek Ireland.

If the greyhound toll is included in the shelter toll, as the reporting leaves unclear, greyhounds accounted for 13% of Irish shelter dog killing in 1993, 58% in 2003, and 78% in fiscal 2005. If the greyhound toll is separate, greyhounds accounted for 11% in 1993, 37% in 2003, and 44% in fiscal 2005. Either way, ex-racing greyhounds are the largest single source of homeless dogs killed in Ireland.

Hidden taxes

Greyhound racing thrived even when Ireland was poor. Now that Ireland has the fastest growing economy in Europe, the Irish government sees dog racing as perhaps the easiest way to raise taxes in a nation whose historical antagonism toward tax collectors is why Sallins Castle was built.

“A major difference be-tween greyhound racing here and there,” Coleman told ANIMAL PEOPLE, “is that in Ireland the Bord na gCon––the Irish equivalent of the National Greyhound Associ-ation––is almost an official government agency. Many aspects of the greyhound industry receive special privileges. So the industry seems to be more monolithic than here.

“I began going to Ireland on a regular basis in 1978,” Coleman added. “I have Irish grandparents and used to go over to visit family, hear music, and have a good time. After my greyhound work began in 1983, I realized that the glut of extraneous greyhounds in the U.S. had a corollary in Ireland. Many of the dogs raced here are from Ireland or are bred from Irish dogs.

“In 1994 I heard that the World Greyhound Racing Feder-ation was meeting in Dublin. I decided to see what was happening,” Coleman recalled. “I was not an official registrant but sat in on many presentations. I became worried about plans to send greyhounds to race in countries where there is little or no animal protection, including in the Far East, Spain, and Morocco. Even with marginal welfare provisions, those dogs’ fate was obviously grim. And in some ways things have not gottten better.

“In Ireland,” Coleman said, “one major change is that there are now shelters that take greyhounds. When I started work with FitzGibbon in 1994, almost no Irish greyhounds were rescued. Now there is <www.IrishAnimals.com>, and some greyhounds get exposure.”

Coleman noted that in Ireland, by law, racing greyhounds must be muzzled if outside their kennels, lest they attack other small animals after being trained to race by chasing live rabbits.

“In Ireland, greyhounds are used for coursing, as well as racing,” Coleman pointed out. “Cours-ing is a spectator sport, even sometimes televised, in which greyhounds tear a live rabbit to shreds. From this, people have the mistaken idea that greyhounds are dangerous,” even though no greyhound has ever been listed on the ANIMAL PEOPLE log of life-threatening and fatal dog attacks, kept since 1982. The log includes more than 2,000 attacks by dogs of 83 different breeds and combinations, including more than 1,000 attacks by pit bull terriers and nearly 400 by Rottweilers.

Coleman sees convincing the Irish public that greyhounds are not inherently dangerous as the first step toward turning public opinion against the cruelties of greyhound racing and training––and coursing, the longtime primary target of the Irish League Against Cruel Sports.

“For the past seven years I have set up a greyhound welfare/ adoption booth at the Dublin Horse Show,” Coleman said. “Initially, people would look at our booth as if we were crazy to offer greyhounds as companions. Gradually more and more people have stopped to say that they have taken in a stray greyhound, or lurcher, or have adopted one from a pound. People believe what they see,” Coleman emphasized. “If there were not legions of adopted greyhounds out and around in the U.S., the greyhound welfare effort would be stunted.”

Coleman agreed that takng industry funding seems to make Irish greyhound advocates “more hesitant to lobby against racing,” but noted that even in the U.S., “Different groups have different work. The Greyhound Protection League is the most outspoken. Adoption groups like Greyhound Friends,” as frank as Coleman herself is, “have to be more circumspect. If we are seen as anti-racing, the tracks will not give us dogs.”

The leading dog welfare organization in Britain, already helping dogs in Ireland too, and planning to add an Irish affiliate, is Dogs Trust.

“I chair the U.K. Greyhound Forum and the International Greyhound Forum. Deirdre Hetherington sits on the latter,” Dogs Trust chief executive Clarissa Baldwin told ANIMAL PEOPLE. “I agree it is a difficult line to walk when you accept money and then need to cajole the same people to change their ways. Dogs Trust does not accept money from the industry,” Bald-win stipulated. “I do, however, believe in working from within, and have spent much time with the industry bosses. Deirdre is not backward when she talks to the industry,” Baldwin avered, “and weighs in heavily when she thinks they are not doing what has been promised.

“Her kennels are by no means perfect,” Baldwin continued, “but I think she does her best, and she does save a lot of dogs’ lives. She turned her home over to the dogs and is very short of cash. We help her out with neutering vouchers when we can.

“There is a lot of work to be done in Ireland,” Baldwin emphasized, “but there are moves afoot to do it. New greyhound breeding and transport laws are under discussion. Our frustration is with the length of time it takes! Ireland is a very rich country now, and Irish care of animals has to be improved in line with this.”

––Merritt Clifton