Natural History

Update: I am pro-greyhound racing and pro-NGA.  (I wrote a post opposing the Florida amendment last October.) The reason this litter will be AKC registered is that they are not being bred for professional racing. They are being bred for sport and coursing homes. My partner has years of experience working at racing greyhound kennels, and we are very sighthound savvy.  We will not let someone walk away with a driven puppy without fully explaining the issues in raising and civilizing such a creature. The parents are going to be health tested (the Embark samples are in the mail).  I don’t want racing greyhounds to wind up like otterhounds, where there are scarcely any left now that their main reason for existence has been banned. 

Greyhound racing in the United States is on its way out. Florida was the last large state that had lots of tracks going, but in the 2018 general election, Florida voters decided to phase out professional greyhound racing.

In the short run, these dogs are going to filter their way into adoption. The vast majority of them will find homes. And every single one of them will be neutered.

Because only a handful of states will have racing, it is very unlikely that thousands of racing greyhounds will be bred every year. When this generation of adopted out greyhounds dies, the greyhound owning public will not have many options.

Yes, they can buy a show-bred greyhound, go out West and get a coursing dog, or they get a whippet or borzoi.  I suspect that galgos from Spain will be imported over here in very high numbers.

But if they want a sport-bred greyhound that derives from racing lines, they will essentially be out of luck.  However, they won’t be.

Several of us are close enough to forward-thinking racing dog owners to get our hands on intact racing greyhounds that we will be breeding. Erika is scheduled to be bred on her next heat, and we already have the sire picked out. Stay tuned for updates on him.

And we will do what we can to keep the American racing greyhound lines alive the best we can. We already have lots of homes lined up for this coming litter, so the demand for these dogs is quite high. The litter will be AKC-registered, so they can enter the “legit” greyhound population and do AKC-sanctioned events.

We will be helping these lines see a future beyond greyhound racing, and I have to say that I’m proud be part of this project.

So yeah, I’m deep in show dogs now, but we are working on keeping some nice working lines of a breed going into the future.

I’m pretty excited about it.