2009-06-03 Rehoming Greyhounds

Have you even seen a dog race? Elegant greyhound speeding like the wind to be the first at the goal to get a treat from their loving masters. What a noble sport. Or so you might think. In my mind however, dog racing is on the same level as bull fights and snipers. Here's a fact about the dogs' loving masters: They kill their dogs as soon as they can't perform good enough any more.

If you don't believe me, read between the lines of the Wikipedia article about Greyhound racing:
- One in four retired greyhounds finds a home as a pet.
- Prior to the formation of adoption groups, over 20,000 retired greyhounds a year were euthanized.
So now it's only three fourth of that number. In other word: every year, approximately 15,000 dogs get killed because their shitface owners can't run for themselves.

(I'm leaving some space here so that you have time to get your head around that.)

That's why there is this Greyhound Rehoming movement in New Zealand. With bumper stickers and all. I have very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it saves the life of an innocent dog. On the other hand, it makes some stupid assholes think that dog races are okay, because a small percentage of the dogs does not get euthanized. "At least they get a fair chance. It's not my fault they don't get adopted."

It's a bit like the hostage problem. If bank robbers take hostages, there are basically two choices. Give them what they want and save the hostages' lives, or kill the hostage-taker and jeopardize the (innocent!) hostage. The better short term solution is obviously to save lives. But in the long run, if it is known that hostage-takers get shot on sight regardless of the hostages, there will be much less such situations in the future.
I have no perfect solution for that problem, I just wanted to point out that a short term solution might not be the right one, even if it saves lives.

(I have been told more than once in no uncertain terms that my comparisons are not very high quality. So I'm going to explain it here. Putting down greyhounds at the end of their career is like shooting hostage-takers. Rehoming the dogs is like giving hostage-takers what they want. The long term solution should probably be to outlaw dog races. No more dead dogs.)

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Just because I don't want this post to end on a depressing note about the world we live in, I'm going to tell you that I had 11 (miniature) donuts for lunch and 3 steaks for dinner. I ate like I didn't get any food yesterday, because I didn't. Because it wouldn't stay inside. They have a whole different subspecies of viruses here in New Zealand, and my poor German antibodies are helpless against those evil kiwi infections. But now it's over. I showed them stupid viruses. Booyah!