Greyt Exploitations fought long and hard for injury data to be published and on March 14th 2018 – that became a reality. Albeit in an anonymised and aggregate format – the death toll of more than 1,000 greyhounds destroyed created a media frenzy and a live debate on national TV.

Way back in 2011 we had a vision – a vision to expose the extent of injuries but using information published by the industry. As a result we started collecting race comments from the GBGB’s website which highlighted where a dog had failed to finish – a long distance behind the leading pack or finished lame and also recorded those dogs that didn’t race again within 6 months following an incident – with the view to evidencing one of the industry’s cruel practices…..racing dogs on dangerously configured tracks and how many dogs go unaccounted for.

It was to be another 4 years before Greyt Exploitations Database was published with support from reporter Sanya Burgess of the politically influential Sunday Times with the headline “40,000 racing greyhounds hurt”.

Dogs Today magazine also ran a three page feature ‘The disappearing dogs’ in their December 2015 issue.

We not only invested in a dedicated database website but also in satellite and recording equipment – logging every transmitted race to visibly evidence the on-track injuries and cruelty of racing dogs in severe weather conditions.

We also launched an online petition that has gathered over 21,000 signatures calling for the Greyhound Board of Great Britain to publish detailed monthly injury statistics.

More importantly during the 2015 Efra enquiry – MP’s acknowledged our research stating “Analysis provided by the welfare organisation Greyt Exploitations, in association with the Sunday Times, of incidents at races over a 10 year period reported that 40,151 dogs were injured and 18,410 did not race again” and that “We recommend that Defra amend the 2010 Regulations to require the publication of essential welfare data relating to injury, euthanasia and rehoming numbers”

More evidence of how  instrumental our work had been came straight from the Greyhound Trainers Rep – Peter Harnden – who in a televised broadcast stated  “I think the statistics are coming out because it’s been forced to and it’s because you have got the animal rights people out there who have got the ear of people nowadays and their doing different tactics of a way round of doing things – it’s not cos they want the injury rate to be better they just don’t want greyhound racing”

So thank you to each and everyone of you who has supported us – signed our petition – shared our Facebook posts and videos – made donations – we hope you will agree your support and donations have been well invested with good dividends! Special thanks go to LUSHGREY2K and Pet Levrieri for grants made to support our work and to the Sunday Times and Dogs Today magazine for the media coverage.

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Lastly – we would like to assure you we will continue to work hard to bring an end to the cruelty of dog racing and first on the list of ‘things to do’ is to discredit the injury and retirement data published by the GBGB – campaign for even greater transparency and inevitably a ban……we’re on it!