A Vendetta Reaches Its Climax

by Dennis McKeon

I confess. I actually felt sorry for Christine Dorchak. Christine is the chief cook and bottle washer at the Somerville Massachusetts Kool-Aid and Arsenic Emporium, also known as Grey2k. She suffered and survived a near fatal accident as a young woman, and personally, I find nothing gratifying about that.

Grey2k has worked relentlessly, for over a decade, to stereotype greyhound racing professionals as exploiters, abusers and murderers of racing greyhounds. They are very good at what they do. What they did, in the case of Massachusetts, is to propagandize skillfully enough to have outlawed state-sanctioned, pari-mutuel wagering on greyhound races, essentially shutting down a network of businesses, and disenfranchising hundreds of families who relied on racing and the racetracks for their livelihoods. With that a fait accompli, when it came time to find homes for all the greyhounds who suddenly had nowhere to go, Grey2k simply scratched gravel, and essentially told the greyhounds, “see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya”.

Noted greyhound adoption advocate and one of the founders of The Greyhound Project, Joan Belle Isle, had something to say about it. When asked on a message board, whether Grey2k and specifically, Christine Dorchak, had stuck around to help in re-homing the greyhounds who found themselves, overnight, in need of a place to go, as Grey2k had assured the voting public they would, Ms. Belle Isle responded:

"With respect to Raynham, the answer to your question is NO. But that didn't stop her from taking the credit for the work of the dogmen and adoption volunteers, led by Linda Jensen, that got every dog with no other place to go into an adoption program."

Grey2k is a registered non-profit organization, and they rely on public donations to fund their slash-and-burn brand of political activism. They claim that they “help the greyhounds”, but they have never been, nor are they now an adoption group or a hands on provider of greyhound welfare services. Grey2k is a political action group with strong ties to an anti-gambling activist organization called Stop Predatory Gambling.

A long-running vendetta waged by anti-racing activists to personally destroy a member of the Arizona Racing Commission, one Rory Goree, has currently taken center stage in the Grey2k Travelling Kabuki Theatre.

Goree recently made some flippant and insensitive remarks about Christine Dorchak’s aforementioned unfortunate accident, when as a young woman, she was struck by a Boston rail trolley. She suffered very serious injury, and worked her way through what one can only imagine must have been extremely grueling and trying rehabilitation. Mr. Goree’s comments were ill-advised and crass, and I can’t blame Carey Theil, Ms. Dorchak’s husband and cohort at Grey2k, for taking exception to them, as much as I loathe the unethical and destructive antics of Grey2k.

Rory Goree, prior to his appointment as a member of the Arizona Racing Commission, had worked for 17 years in greyhound adoption. He, like Grey2k, was very good at what he did. Good enough to have been made President of Greyhound Pets of America, the largest greyhound adoption network in the world. Under Goree’s stewardship, unprecedented realms of cooperation between racing and adoption were realized. Thousands of greyhounds were given a chance to find adoptive homes, so much so that they have become a virtual phenomenon in the canine world. Thanks in no small part to Rory Goree, adoption has become the final chapter in nearly every racing greyhound’s career. The racing greyhound has never---ever---had a better or more accomplished advocate than Rory Goree.

Rather than working to demonize racing professionals, to abolish racing, and to therefore turn the racing greyhound into a fringe breed, Goree reached out to racing and the powers that be, and treated them like responsible owners and breeders. He raised the bar and challenged them to make that jump. He took away most excuses that racing might make about being unable to work with an antagonistic adoption community, by making peace among various factions within the racing and adoption communities. The greyhounds all won.

Ironically, this worked against the slash-and-burn activists at Grey2k, whose donations rise and fall, proportionally, according to the amount of friction and enmity that exists between adoption and racing, among other forms of discord and controversy.

This is evidenced by the letter Grey2k sent out to its supporters and enablers during Goree’s tenure as GPA President, which read:

"Greyhound Pets of America is an arm of the racing industry and representatives of the group come out to testify against our bills in every state. Please, please refrain from interacting with them and/or including them in your Yahoo group discussions and announcements."

Now there’s some real advocacy for you. Refrain from interacting with the largest network of greyhound adoption groups in the world. Why on earth, one might ask? Well, dear reader, the answer is quite simple--because GPA and Rory Goree are actually succeeding in getting racing to cooperate with adoption, and vice versa, and our pockets aren’t exactly jingling as a result.

So that’s how one “helps the greyhounds”—we simply thrill in awe at such soul-purifying compassion.

Fortuitously, for Grey2k, a latent psychopath named Ronnie Williams burst a gasket, and was found to have starved and abandoned 37 greyhounds in a Florida kennel. This afforded them the opportunity to formulate and promote the deliberate “Ronnie Williams-ing” of each and every person who had ever been associated with greyhounds in racing, and must have set the Grey2k cash registers to singing Jingle Bells until the one-horse open sleigh wore out its runner blades.

Grey2k continued to “help the greyhounds” by tarring and feathering the entire greyhound racing working class with the reprehensible and truly deranged misdeeds of Williams, while feathering its own nest with donations from an ever gullible public.

Goree had previously helped facilitate the release of 126 greyhounds who had been sent to Juarez, Mexico to race. They were allowed to go to Juarez under an agreement stating that when the season ended, they would be returned to the US. When that guarantee proved to be a bit less than ironclad, GPA group leaders and Goree made sure the agreement was lived up to, at their own personal expense, rescuing the dogs in question.

Ever laying in wait for a bonanza like the one Ronnie Williams would soon gift to them, Grey2k apparently couldn’t be bothered to help, or even offer moral support.

So as payback for all his unprecedented work in adoption, Goree, whose appointment to the Racing Commission was applauded by real greyhound welfare providers as an unprecedented positive step for greyhound protection and adoption, now finds himself on tenterhooks of his own making. For statements that are unworthy of him or his brilliant career as a true greyhound benefactor—and despite Grey2k’s own history of promoting hurtful, negative stereotypes of racing professionals, of adoption people who cooperate with them, and of willful and ruthless job destruction.

Grey2k is now waging a campaign to have one of the great advocates and facilitators of greyhound adoption removed from the Arizona Racing Commission, because of his remarks concerning the devastating accident that befell Christine Dorchak. I can’t see how that is going to “help the greyhounds” one little bit, but I can understand a husband’s indignation. Goree’s peace-making and adoption triumphs, additionally, were and still are an anathema to the Grey2k agenda and pocketbook.

Nevertheless, for a moment there, I felt that I could actually relate to Carey and Christine on a basic, human level. Then, all at once, in my very own Saint Paul moment, suddenly I saw the clouds part and the lightning flash.

Reverting to form, Grey2k has now begun---shamelessly and with an audacity of which only the truly depraved are capable---are you ready for this?… the “Rory Truth Fund”.

No-they-di-int…

Oh yes they did!!

Nothing soothes hurt feelings like cold, hard cash.

Copyright, 2012