Trying To Reason with Hurricane Season

By Dennis McKeon

This is the time of year that I usually begin to check the Weather Underground “severe weather” reports. I don’t like hurricanes. They knock over trees. I like trees. Just not on, nor through the roof of the house.

So my first of many yearly excursions to that estimable web page, brought to mind the hurricane of 2017, called Irma. It posed a clear and present danger to the state of Florida (among others). There was a great deal of concern not only for the residents of Florida, but for the estimated 8-10,000 actively racing greyhounds who live and race there.

In hindsight, it is interesting to note, that the same people who call themselves “greyhound protectors”, and who are politically active today, in attempting to ban greyhound racing in Florida, thereby disenfranchising many of those 8-10,000 greyhounds, had an equally curious strategy, then, to “protect” those greyhounds.

As Florida residents undertook a mass exodus of their state, gridlocking highways and emptying gas stations up and down the isthmus, the self-styled experts behind today’s “Committee to Protect Dogs”, were demanding that the greyhounds of Florida join the insanity.

Insisting that the kennels at the various racetracks were not built well enough to withstand the force of a Category 4 hurricane, they were trumpeting all over the media, that Florida’s racing greyhounds should be evacuated, 10-12 at a time, if need be, to who knows where. And that it was the height of unconcern for Florida's racing professionals not to do so at once.

24 Hrs Post Irma

Naturally, people who actually understand and know how to care for large colonies of greyhounds, were virtually dumbstruck by the pure absurdity of such an impracticable and dangerous suggestion, which, when amplified incessantly by the media, became a more of a taunt.

Fortunately, Florida’s greyhound racing professionals did not panic, and as greyhound racing professionals always have done, they chose to ride out the storm, and to stay in the kennels with their greyhounds. Because that’s what real greyhound protectors do. They place the greyhounds first. Not their agenda, and not their personal safety.

And not a single greyhound, nor their attendant trainers or kennel owners in the state of Florida, was harmed by the considerable rage of Hurricane Irma---despite the dire warnings and taunts of those self-styled experts, who are now the braintrust of ‘The Committee To Protect Dogs”.

Courtesy of the Committee to Protect Dogs. this year’s brainstorm of “greyhound protection”, for those of you who aren’t aware, is to ban greyhound racing in Florida, via a Constitutional Amendment, to be voted on by the public. Demonstrating once again, that “fake greyhound protectors”, should be feared more by greyhounds, than Armageddon hurricanes. Or by the prospect of thousands of Florida’s greyhounds having to be re-homed by independent adoption groups, without any contingency plan built into the proposed legislation.

Meanwhile, the “greyhound protectors”, or the Committee to Protect Dogs, or whatever counter-intuitive name they are calling themselves by then, will ride off into the sunset, as they always have, without a care or concern in the world for any of that.

Just like Hurricane Irma did.

copyright, 2018

(with acknowledgment to Jimmy Buffet)