Sick as a Dog: The slow death of Greyhound Racing

Two weeks ago the Wall Street Journal produced some sobering facts, at least from the perspective of greyhound owners. The sport, which was once the best-attended in Britain, now boasted fewer than two million patrons a year. This was in stark contrast to its heyday in the 1940s, when fifty million people a year went to the dogs. In America, where it was synonymous with blue-collar life, greyhound racing has now become part of Rust Belt. Ten years ago, there were fifty tracks in fifteen states, now there are only twenty-five, concentrated in just seven states. Sixteen of those are in Florida, and the amount gambled on the sport has halved in the past decade. Dog owners have some cause for optimism. The sport is making inroads in China, largely because of its openness to gambling. However, in its Anglo-Saxon heartlands, greyhound racing is at best a niche sport, up there with polo and pigeon racing as being something that requires an initial financial outlay that discourages most punters. Unless one is an aficionado, there is little incentive to bet on the sport (critical voices suggest that many races are heavily rigged), and like horse racing, dog racing is all about the gambling. The sport's primary revenue generators are split between anoraks, who tend to bet small but frequently, and those who are looking for a more offbeat night out.

What accounts for the demise of dog racing? The movement towards bookmakers shops and online gambling provides one answer. A sport that, at one point, was one of the few outlets a punter had now finds itself competing in a much wider field than before. It is telling that it is in China, where there are stiff restrictions on gambling, that the sport is pinning its hopes.
Perhaps the main reason that dog racing has gone into decline is sociological. In its prime, greyhound racing was, like all sports, an intensely personal affair. The live game was what mattered, and greyhound racing could deliver on all fronts. It didn't require patrons' constant attention, allowing them a social forum, and encouraging them to partake in other activities, primarily drinking and gambling, both of which generated revenue for the tracks.


Fast-forward to today, and almost all of a sport's revenues now come from a television audience, who want something different, and dog racing's biggest assets have become its biggest liabilities. The relaxed, social nature of race meets, where for spectators the race was secondary to the social side, does not translate over to television. For a TV viewer, dog racing is twenty minutes of ennui followed by twenty seconds of excitement. Unlike horse racing, which has both a whole social scene to follow and the advantage of volume (many racing programmes show racing from multiple venues, meaning that the tedium between racing can be minimised), dog racing has not adapted well to television.
There are other fundamental economic and social changes which have affected the sport. Greyhound racing was a spin off of hare coursing, which in turn was inherently a rural pastime. The increasing urbanisation of Western society has effectively removed the need for a greyhound for anything other than racing. Hare coursing, even when it isn't banned, is a pariah sport, partaken by a diminishing amount of people. Pest control, another asset of owning a greyhound, is not particularly important to most people. And a greyhound is a rather high-maintenance dog. They don't function well on their own, enjoining owners to acquire a second dog to keep the first company. They have a tendency to kill smaller animals, meaning that any owner who is unfortunate enough to live near a rabbit, cat, etc, is going to have to muzzle their dog. While not (contrary to popular belief) an aggressive or overly exercise-intensive dog, greyhound pups in particular are hyper-energetic, and tend to work off excess energy destructively. With a diminishing pool of people who would be willing to own a greyhound for anything other than racing comes a diminishing pool of potential racers.
Dog racing has also become a victim of another culture shift. While not as ethically dubious as outright blood sports, greyhound racing has no shortage of detractors. A racing dog can spend up to twenty hours a day in a cage on race days and every aspect of the animal's life is micromanaged. Most galling for the animal-rights lobby is what happens to the dogs after their racing career. Given that the lifespan of a greyhound can be up to fourteen years, but their racing prime is past when they turn five, a racing dog is useless for the last decade of its life. Every year, tens of thousands of retired greyhounds are killed by their owners, despite the growth in recent years of greyhound re-homing projects. In Britain alone, a conservative estimate of how many dogs are destroyed a year pegs the number at five thousand, and similar rates can be expected from Ireland and the USA, which don't produce statistics. In an age where animal welfare has become a big issue, dog racing is fighting to make sure it ends up on the right side of the animal sports debate, with equestrian events, rather than being associated with foxhunting and cockfighting as blood sports.

The sport is not without potential. It has taken off in a big way in China. A nation of 1.3 billion gambling addicts is a serious asset, and in economic terms, the future for dog racing lies in the East. Already, Western owners are moving their business plan towards servicing the massive potential Chinese demand, rather than dealing with a declining local market. However, while there is a huge market, dog racing hasn't yet made the transition to television, so an increasingly affluent China may rapidly leave it just as soon as it takes to it.
In Ireland, a second possible ancilliary source of revenue has been floated. With the expected change in gambling laws to allow for proper casinos, the greyhound industry is seeking a monopoly on such establishments, arguing that they are best equipped to manage the gambling industry, as they are one of the major centres for betting. However, they face stiff competition from the equestrian industry, and with the entry into the market of Richard Quirke's proposed development in Two-Mile-Borris, it looks like any hopes of a dog-racing monopoly in casino gambling are in vain.



What then for greyhound racing? The advent of television has presented many sports with challenges. Some have adapted well. Football has morphed from a game primarily associated with the working class into a multi-billion euro industry. After a shaky start, cricket has managed, with the introduction of the Twenty20 format, to adjust to the TV market and profit accordingly. Darts changed from a niche game to theatre with a sporting facet, and has essentially coined money ever since. Perhaps, with a few adjustments, greyhound racing could become profitable again.
Paramount among these is to make the sport more telegenic. The era of live sport is gone and won't be back. Dog racing was designed for a particular audience, and needs to recognise that this audience no longer exists. The easiest way to adapt to today's audience is to have more races on a night, rather than the long drawn-out interlude between races that is the norm now. While the current system (in Dublin) of scheduling races in Shelbourne and Harold's Cross on alternate days boosts live traffic, it makes things unwatchable on TV.
The industry also needs to market itself again. The decline in spectator numbers has also left a rump of fans who want something from the sport that doesn't appeal to outsiders. The casual sports fan wants a game that offers constant excitement, unlike the intermittent bits of action in dog racing. The anorak's love of dog racing is based on the minutae, but this is precisely what the casual fan doesn't want.
It may be that greyhound racing is beyond salvation. It is under siege on a variety of fronts. It can't generate revenue. It has a huge lobby opposed to it on grounds of cruelty. Perhaps most devastatingly, much of the world has forgotten about it. And most importantly, it lacks a strategy to move beyond this situation. If it doesn't develop one, then dog racing is in danger of going the way of hurley hacket, French billiards, and Basque pelota, and become only interesting to a tight clique, forgotten by the masses that once defined it.