THE remarkable thing about the English ruling classes is their cultural blindness. Every country they colonised they endeavoured to destroy the culture, sometimes out of malice but more often out of blindness to its strength, beauty and power.

Every revolution that occurred in Ireland for the nine hundred years of occupation was a fight for culture, once that desire to get back to culture gets lit in peoples hearts there is no putting it out. The Irish had a great reputation for hell-raising and jail filling a hundred years ago very much like our aboriginal population today.

Loss of culture leaves a deep gash in the hearts of men and women. The wounds of the stolen generations will themselves take generations to heal.

Two years ago a determined attack was launched on the culture of greyhound racing. The attackers were colonisers of a new kind but still white Anglo-Saxon middle class and operating by the same old rules. The coloniser is always self-righteous and superior, oblivious to the strength, beauty and power of a sport that for most of us was never a job but more a win-win relationship between animal and man.

The method of attack is to disparage, dehumanise and portray barbarity and base behaviour as the norm rather than the exception. Most reasonable independent observers now accept that the media storm that blew over greyhound racing blew more fiction than fact. The coloniser cannot edify a culture and co-exist they must reduce it to rubble and replace it with their better culture.

What better culture are we being offered? The innate desire to have a relationship with an animal is deep within many people. For lots of us it is the strongest and most important relationship we have. The critics of the sport of greyhound racing would like to see that relationship broken for ever and replaced with one where the dog is treated as a household companion and denied the innate desire it has to chase.

The cities are full of dogs that are very unhappy. They have been selectively bred for thousands of years to do a job largely by manipulation of their instinct to chase prey for food and then after thousands of years of fine tuning their skills they are told in the second half of the twentieth century we do not need your skills anymore, but you can spend your life in a small backyard getting frustrated or fat or in a lot of cases both.

I hear their frustration every night, no wonder tens of thousands of domestic dogs perish at the hands of vets annually.

In todays world of sedation and automation there are fewer and fewer opportunities for human beings to enjoy a hands on real equal relationship with an animal species where there a rewards for both to enjoy. Farming enterprises are steadily becoming larger, more programmed and automated year on year. I hear sighs form those readers who believe all the propaganda that greyhounds are automated money making machines whose worth is only counted in dollar bills and the owners relationship with the dog is simply about money.

Sigh all you like, but you are an idiot. Greyhounds are bred to chase, they are bred to live in a pack, they perform because they are healthy and well looked after and they bloody love it.

They are not blood thirsty killers and neither are their owners. It is true they wear muzzles, but only because some early colonials were worried their sheep would be attacked and politicians ever since have not had the common sense to see that greyhounds are one of the most docile breeds of dogs alive. In my travels around Australia I have seen very few sheep in suburbia and even less greyhounds that were being denied a daily meal.

Greyhound owners and trainers would love to see many of their greyhounds moved into good homes in the community, however, between them, they should have the exclusive right to decide that a dog that has been observed and cared is suitable for transition into suburbia.

Some greyhounds, while being terrific chasers may have anti-social habits such as aggression towards other dogs, towards human beings, which is very rare, excessive barking or home demolition and in my opinion these dogs are not suitable for release into the community. No trainer makes this decision lightly, but neither should they be condemned for it. That greyhound lived a fulfilled life, probably more fulfilled than a great many Australian household pets.

The human discharge from this sport in the last couple of years has gone from a trickle to a flood. These people, largely middle aged, have lost their equivalent to the mens shed or bingo night. Many live a lonelier existence with nothing but the TV or the pokie venue to replace it.

Thanks, but no thanks; you can keep your better culture.

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What they fail to see and don't want to see is this sport nurtures these dogs in the safest possible way from rearing to racing.
There is an attrition rate for every living thing on the planet.
Nature can be a very cruel thing and if Greyhounds were left to roam free and fend for themselves that rate would probably be around 99% and most would die a very painful death.
Seventy kilometre an hour animals running into trees after prey is never a great outcome.

And their "better culture" wouldn't include a loving pet Greyhound.

They seem to believe that their self-assumed moral superiority gives them the right to dictate to governments of all persuasions on social and economic policy.

And then use derogatory terms as racist or redneck to put down and stereotype opponents, being most ordinary Australians, as guilty and living in the past.

As Des indicates, their moral superiority is not justified by facts. Taking on their emotional arguments is pointless. They need to be taken on with facts.

DISLIKES ..Show us many watch and read so much on Social Media especially here on Data and i get the feeling the Tide is turning back to favour all OTB ....and Greyhound lovers ...

Many great suggestions and debates to follow ensure that we keep this ball rolling in the right direction and the Government and PTB are now starting to listen to the masses ....

We are all now starting to stir the pot together... Great to see ...

Ross and Bruce and Micky ..Luv ya work fella's

However, the public is not reading this. They don't read ARG. They don't refer to authority websites or to formguides. And they generally don't watch races. They do check newspaper and TV headlines and read negative articles (positive ones don't sell).

We are all agreeing with each other but we are not talking to the public so misunderstandings are to be expected.

Two groups are to blame. First, participants are notoriously reluctant to venture into the public sphere. I have attended many meetings where fewer than 10 people were genuine members of the public. Chatting to a trainer is like pulling teeth. They are innately suspicious, they are introverted. They will talk to their mates but not to the public. (OK, there are the odd exceptions but they only prove the rule).

Potentially, trainers are our greatest asset but they are under-selling their capabilities.

Second, racing authorities barely know what the question is. Their marketing performances are abysmal or even non-existent. They prefer paper pushing to adventurous behaviour.

When pressed (as with the breeding downturn) they resort to attacking the fringes and the frippery rather than the basics. NSW wants to fiddle with grading rather than find out why people are not rushing to buy pups. Victoria is asking owners to race the runts of the litters in what will end up as a continuing degradation of the quality of racing. What, for instance, will it do to FTC and fighting convictions?

Here's a sidelight to both viewpoints. Back in the 1990s I badgered old Bob Cartwright so much that he eventually organised my attendance at a NSW GRA board meeting to talk about marketing. On one item I suggested that what we needed to do was to present the industry in such a way that it would impress a suburban housewife (not a PC term now but it was then). The only person around that table who understood what I meant was the vet. He ran a suburban clinic. The others ignored what I was saying and kept throwing rocks at each other - as was their habit. Nothing was achieved and nothing much has changed since.

As one example, possibly no-one - anywhere - has tried to explain to the public or to the opposing forces that greyhound racing has ensured the excellence of the breed, and arguably its survival - unlike many of the other Heinz57 varieties on show today, genetic malfunctions and all.

I have enjoyed Fegan articles over many years in National Tabform and elsewhere. However, Des, look in your own backyard. The AVA and its greyhound offshoot is horribly uninformative in its website approach to the public. It tells you almost nothing and hides possibly interesting articles behind a members-only wall. It certainly does nothing to promote greyhounds. I once wrote to the NSW branch during the McHugh Commission and got an acknowledgement but never a real response.

The result of the hidden veil around greyhound racing is that the public does not know what it is all about so they will make up their own minds - or make up untruths with little fear of contradiction. Nasties get blown out of proportion, goodies do not figure.

Outside the building holding the Borsak Parliamentary hearings I approached one of the many demonstrators carrying a big sign reading "Stop Subsidies to Greyhounds". In the year just ended, NSW greyhound racing had paid $21.3 million in direct taxes alone. Oh dear!

It needs all shoulders to the wheel.

By the way Kevin - you should attribute the Fegan article to ARG who own the copyright.

Bruce
Copyright you say ....What does that mean in todays climate ..

I did post the link directly to ARG ....It was SHARED on facebook so Bruce don't be sad ..
Rejoice in Knowing that Social Media is the main player for NEWS and up to date action daily ....

Old Columnist and Journalists are having a hard time adjusting to this Social Media Change but keep on posting because i do enjoy your Professional appeal and approach here on Data ...

Merry XMas ..

I realise there are many breaches these days but that's the law.

Short excerpts are usually OK though.

This is not social media but a managed blog. Different thing. I have no trouble adjusting to social media myself - I simply ignore it as it is usually unsubstantiated rubbish. I have better things to do.

What gets shared here gets shared to Facebook and visa versa ...

It is 2017 Bruce and its about Copy paste and sharing stories and content all related to Greyhounds and Greyhound Racing to every form Social Media Blogs and so on ...

Newspapers are dead and buried ...Get over it ...

IPhones Tablets Personal Handheld devices desktops laptops are the Newspapers ...

Newspaper is only good for wiping your backside when in trouble even then it leaves a stain and rash for days ..

I see the Copyright Agency, which represent authors, is suing the NSW government for $6 million for unpaid copies of "photocopies ... of newspaper, magazine and journal articles and photographs by state public servants".

On the newspaper subject, Fairfax Media is probably the greyhound industry's greatest opposing force with its constant stream of anti-greyhound stories - worse even than the ABC or Animals Australia. They need regular watching.

You might recall the Canberra incident a little while ago where a trainer inadvertently ran his dog while under a 10 day ban from a weight variation at Richmond. The Sun Herald converted that into a three page rant, partly on the front page. You could call that the multiplier effect. No doubt the Canberra Greens would have kept a copy, or the Canberra Times would have covered it as well (not sure but Fairfax owns it, too).

Risen from the dead?