20 Years of Observation: Greyhound Hauls
20 years ago, when we first started to receive greyhounds, most of them came by air. But as airlines prices rose and more efforts were put towards saving these wonderful animals, trucks began bringing the dogs to us. In the beginning, these trucks were often racing-industry associated. You would always know when one was in our compound because the smell was just horrible. The carpets in each of the enclosures reeked of urine. In some cases we felt so bad for the remaining dogs that we would throw the old carpeting away and replace it with some of our own used carpeting remnants.
In September of this year, we received some dogs from Miami. The smell emanating from the truck was horrendous not to mention that one of the dogs had to be treated with IV fluids because he was overheating. Two hours earlier that same day, a haul also arrived from Daytona and dropped off a load of greyhounds. They arrived in a beautiful trailer, where clean hay was piled 10 inches thick and there was no odor coming from it.
A week later, we received yet another haul of dogs. The hauler, notorious at NGAP already from previous hauls, showed up three hours late. Half of the dogs still had to go on to Massachusetts. For the dogs’ sake, we volunteered to keep them all overnight at our facility. We treated all of the remaining greyhounds with flea and tick spray, gave them a snack, power washed the trailer and threw away the carpets. Heaven only knows when that trailer had last been cleaned. I sometimes wonder how the dogs can survive the intense urine smell for 26 hours of travel, but somehow most of them do.
I was also reminded that so many greyhounds, in spite of the fact that they are in this horrible box that smells like hell, still do not pee until we let them out into a yard. Dogs that are let out regularly will pee from three to maybe fifteen seconds. Dogs coming off a trip from Florida pee and pee for what seems like forever…literally minutes! The industry can tell me, or better yet the industry can tell others, how much better the greyhounds have it now, but when I looked at those two trucks bringing dogs to the good life, at least from the industry standpoint, things have not change at all. It still stinks!
