Tough Questions….No Answers

By Dennis McKeon

Those of you who believe that you are somehow more humane and morally superior to the people in the Greyhound Racing community, have a lot to learn about populations of dogs, and managing them. Each and every individual Greyhound for whom you profess to care so much, has emerged from a unique population of Greyhounds.

Everything you love or may not love about those dogs, is inexorably linked by cause and effect, and by the highly selective process which racing demands that breeders employ, to the well being of that greater population of Greyhounds.

The idea that the cessation of racing and breeding for racing, would not devastate your Greyhound population and all future populations of them, resulting in the loss, forever, of unique and irreplaceable strains and entire families of Greyhounds-- some of whose lineage can be documented as far back as the 18th century--is short-sighted, to say the very least, and hardly more humane than whatever it is you find to be so distasteful about racing itself.

The inconsolable. "ban everything I don't like" activist, who has no capacity or desire to engage in constructive (not destructive) behavior, or to participate in the cultural and material evolution of racing, is essentially promoting "advocacy by extinction", which is not now, nor will it ever be, a humane concept.

Why is there a such gaping disconnect between the individual Greyhound and the population of Greyhounds, from which every individual Greyhound has emerged?

How does one suppose to be any sort of an advocate, and how do you claim the moral high ground, until you mend that disconnect?

These dogs don't suddenly appear from Unicorn dust. They are a result of thousands of years of breeding, and in modern times, dozens of female families and generations of having been bred to race---for nearly a century now. They are the embodiment of all that, the good, the bad, and the faulty.

The Racing Greyhound today, is possibly the most fowardly adapted canine in the world, to its present function. That didn't happen by serendipity. It is the result of a design, a process, a model, where there are inputs (breeding, raising, training, handling) and feedbacks (the results of head to head racing competitions and how they are perceived to enable accurate selectivity) that forged the modern, Racing Greyhound, and which support the population of Greyhounds.

You can't have a thriving, genetically diverse, and highly functional Greyhound, without having a thriving, genetically diverse, highly functional population of them. The Greyhound is a manifestation of his/her genetic wellsprings and their effect upon phenotype, temperament, disposition and function.

Unless you have a better design or method in mind, to support, manage and preserve that Greyhound population--in all its diversity and functionality--your advocacy is simply, when it's all said and done, for the margination of a breed, and nothing more. And by any rational, humane standard, you aren't an advocate at all.

So what are the anti-racing communities' plans---book, chapter and verse---for the future of the Greyhound, and future populations of them, to insure an array of genetic diversity and to maintain the high levels of functionality and stalwart disposition for which the breed is renown and embraced, once racing has been forcibly ceased?

Or will it be every dog for himself, "see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya", and your job is done?

Copyright, 2015