I adopted Tesla (Greys Gold Rush, tattoo#85072 90F) in 1995 from a now-defunct group in Michigan. They were very anti-racing. They told me that I should never try to trace his racing history because they couldn’t remember if they’d gotten him legitimately or if they’d stolen him from a kennel that was going to kill him. They said that if I contacted the NGA and if it turned out that he’d been stolen, *I* would be in a lot of trouble.
They told me that kennels in Florida sold greyhounds to be used as shark bait, sold them to big game hunting compounds in Texas as cheetah entertainment/food, and that they shot them and buried them in big pits after cutting off their ears so they couldn’t be identified. They described in detail various tortures that the dogs endured at the race tracks, such as the use of cattle prods to keep them from sitting in the starting boxes. I didn’t know any better, so I believed everything they told me. I became involved in the adoption group, and after that group went under, I volunteered with another group that was also anti-racing. I became the second group’s newsletter secretary.
Two years after adopting Tesla, I was still very anti-racing when I went to Abilene, Kansas to attend the very first ever internet-organized Abilene greyhound gathering in June, 1997. I actually went to the event just to meet up with a friend from the Greyhound-L, a greyhound email-based discussion group. Email was the only way to discuss greyhounds online back in the days before online forums and Facebook.
In 1996 I had gotten a retired AKC show greyhound from Laurel Drew in New Mexico through the Greyhound-L, and I wanted to meet Laurel in person. I wasn’t really interested in learning about greyhound racing at all; Abilene just happens to conveniently located almost exactly halfway between Albuquerque and Detroit. (The transport of that dog, Snow, from New Mexico to Michigan was the first-ever Internet organized GUR (Greyhound Underground Railroad) transport, btw. But that’s a story for another blog post.)
I took Tesla and Snow to Abilene with me. The Greyhound Hall of Fame employees organized most of the very first Abilene Greyhound Gathering, so many of our activities took place there, including registration. When I arrived, I signed in and gave them my dogs’ names as requested. Within minutes I was paged to the front counter. I had a phone call! I couldn’t figure out who could be calling me, since nobody knew that I was there.
The caller was Mary Butler, owner of Greymeadows Kennels where Tesla had been born and raised. One of the Hall of Fame organizers saw that I had a Greymeadows dog, and called Mary to tell her. Mary insisted that I absolutely must bring Tesla out to her farm so she could see him! I was told later that when Mary insisted on something, everybody jumped to make sure it happened.
Mary said I could bring the other event attendees along when I came to visit her farm. But she said the only time we could come was early in the morning while it was still fairly cool. She said we couldn’t play with the new puppies later in the day when it was too hot. I had been unsure about going until she mentioned puppies; that clinched it for me.
Mary and I decided I would come out there at 6AM on Sunday morning. When I spread the word about the chance to see greyhound puppies, all but two of the event attendees bailed on the Abilene historical walk the event coordinators had planned for that Sunday morning to go visit Greymeadows instead.
We did other greyhound-related things before Sunday morning. We toured the Hall of Fame extensively, visited the NGA headquarters building and got to poke around in piles of old racing programs and look at stud pedigree books, went to the schooling track to watch pups being trained to race, and visited a couple other greyhound farms. I was still anti-racing, and disapproved of almost everything I saw except the pedigrees; those fascinated me.
At one of the farms we visited, the dogs had been kept in outdoor runs with big heavily insulated dog houses all winter. They were ragged looking because they hadn’t fully shed out their winter coats yet, and a few had fly bite sores on their ears. They seemed happy, but they looked awful (to a city girl who had only seen a few mostly overweight pet greyhounds up to that point). I was horrified, and even more convinced that racing was bad.
When we arrived at Greymeadows on Sunday morning, Tesla was the only dog who was allowed to get out and walk around–Mary didn’t want strange dogs walking on her property. She went over every inch of Tesla with her hands, and eventually declared that I was taking good care of him. She smiled as she said I could keep him. Then she handed me a piece of paper with all of his littermates names, colors, and tattoo numbers handwritten on it. She asked me to see if I could find any of them via the internet, because she wasn’t internet-savvy and had not been able to find out where they went after they finished racing. She was very unhappy about that. Apparently the trainers who had those dogs hadn’t told her what happened to any of them. (This was long before the greyhound-data website existed. Sadly, I was unable to ever track down any of them for her. )
(Photos: Mary Butler and Tesla/Greys Gold Rush.)
After that, she personally took us on a tour of the kennels, starting at the kitchen. We got to see a huge bathtub full of food being mixed up for the dogs. The floors and kennels were spotless everywhere we looked. Since it was 6am, I decided that either they had stayed up all night cleaning just for our benefit, or it was like that all the time. The latter option seemed to be a more reasonable explanation.
As we continued the tour, I noticed that all the dogs were sleek, healthy, happy, friendly, and thrilled to see all the new visitors. They didn’t seem to be abused in any way. The puppies were adorable–we saw and played with pups of every age from newborn to almost ready to go into training. We even got to hold puppies that were so young their eyes weren’t even open yet.
(Photo: Greymeadow Kennels, where Tesla was born! This was the home of owners Mary & Jack Butler.)
(Photo: A view across part of Greymeadows, looking at the young-puppy building and runs, then the older-litter building and runs, with a small dog hauler trailer in front.)
(Photo: My niece Michelle Buckner (L) and I think, Tamara DePue (R) playing with some fairly young pups.)
(Photo: Pups perhaps 4 weeks old, taken over the top of a pen with a chain link fence front. I’m short. 🙂 )
The kennel runs for the yearlings were enormous; I think Mary said they were 1000 feet long. Mary knew the name of every dog in every kennel on sight from a distance, without having to look at kennel tags. She showed us a few 14 and 15 year old former brood mamas and stud dogs that still lived on the farm in comfortable private kennel stalls with outdoor runs. She said they had done their jobs well and had given her some great pups, and she loved them too much to send them into adoption. All of the oldsters were healthy and happy. She said she brought a different one up to the house every night for some one-on-one time.
(Photo: My niece Michelle Buckner and some very happy yearling pups.)
Mary had a few dogs in one kennel that were available for adoption; she said she preferred to do her own adoptions when she could, which is why she was so upset that Tesla’s littermates had not been returned to her.
I came away from Greymeadows with the seeds of a new opinion about racing planted in my mind. I had seen that at least one person in racing was not an abusive ogre who mistreated their dogs.
While visiting the NGA headquarters during my Abilene visit, I learned how to find a dog’s racing owner of record, and got the contact information for Tesla’s racing owner. After I went home, I wrote him a letter and sent a photo of Tesla here at home. I got a very nice letter in reply. He was not a hands-on owner, and had no idea where Tesla had gone when he retired. He was glad to hear from me and was happy to know that Tesla was a well-loved member of our family. He sent me a bunch of track programs from Tesla’s races and the check stubs from his meager winnings as a racer. He had also owned Tesla’s littermate sister, but he did not know what had happened to her when she retired.
I wrote an article about my experiences in Abilene, including how to contact the NGA to get a dog’s history and blue slip (the slip that transfers the NGA ownership of the dog from the racing owner to the adoptive owner). I published it in the newsletter of the anti-racing adoption group (nobody ever checked it over before I published it). I mailed that edition to all the members. I was promptly kicked out of the group by the group’s president.
I got lots of positive comments from members of the adoption group who read the article I had published, saying they didn’t know about any of the things I had written. That made me wonder why the group didn’t want anyone to know those things. I only wrote what was true, what I had seen for myself. My eyes had been opened, at least partially, to the truth.
After talking about it on the Greyhound-L online greyhound discussion group, I began to realize there was a whole faction out there in the bigger world who refused to accept the truth that the racing industry isn’t made up entirely of bad, abusive people.
I knew better–I had met some of the good ones.
But I had not been to a greyhound race track, and I still wasn’t convinced that the dogs liked to race. I thought that they were somehow forced to race, although I had no idea how that was done.
The next year I returned to Abilene with Tesla and Snow for another Greyhound Gathering.
We visited the greyhound schooling track in Abilene as part of the weekend’s events. In the down time between trucks full of pups being brought for official schooling, Maury, the schooling track operator, offered to let our pet dogs chase the lure on the track if we wished. Tesla was almost 8 by then, and had been through a series of injuries and illnesses over the past year that had left him very sedentary. He rarely ran at home for more than a few steps. I didn’t think he would want to run on the track.
They were using a larger-than-normal swinging puppy lure which screamed and squawked, and had all sorts of things dangling off of it to keep the new trainees’ attention focused on it. While we watched the yearling pups being schooled, Tesla heard the sound of that lure and tried to climb over the fence to get INTO the track! I had never seen him so excited before.
When it was Tesla’s turn, he ran (slowly) all the way around the track while I sobbed with joy at the sight of my dog running again. At the last curve as the lure slowed down, he jumped up and grabbed it, and swung off of it with all four feet off the ground for a moment. When he let go and dropped to his feet, I could tell he was totally pleased with himself. He had finally caught the elusive lure. After his run was over, the track workers hosed him down with water, and told me to walk him around for a long time to cool him off. As the lure started up for the next dogs, he tried to go over the fence again to chase it once more! A friend recorded video of Tesla’s miracle run. I just wish she’d gotten video of him trying to climb the fence!
(Video–Laurel Drew, hand-slipping Tesla (Greys Gold Rush) at the Abilene KS schooling track, June 1998, recorded by Nancy Simmonds.)
That experience proved to me without a doubt that greyhounds love to run, and nobody MAKES them chase a lure. It’s purely instinctive.
In the years that followed, I have visited several other greyhound tracks and met many people who worked with the dogs. Every one of them treated the dogs like they were made of gold. It began to make sense–the dogs run to make money for their owners, and for the kennels that handle them for the owners. If you want the dog to win, you treat it well.
If Mary had not invited me to visit her kennel, I might never have begun to change my mind.