Post by CampGreyhound on Jan 30, 2014 12:04:14 GMT -5
What Is the Plan?
Controversy is the name of game when the word greyhound is mentioned. I can't think of any other canine subject that has generated more misinformation, more misunderstanding and more unthinking prejudice.
Frankly, I don't blame anyone for not liking a particular form of sporting competition. I don't like golf. It looks like a nice way to spoil a good walk, as far as I'm concerned. So I give golf the thumbs down. It's boring, it's tedious, the whispering of the announcers is obsequious, and some of the athletes look as if they couldn't do a chin up while standing on a step-stool. What I don't have the gall to do is to say that simply playing golf for a living makes all golfers joke athletes, incorrigible boozehounds, degenerate gamblers and serial womanizers, just because a few of them are.
But that sort of broad-brush tar and feathering is the essence of the AR movement. Be that as it may, what I never hear from anyone who is a vocal critic of racing, is the answer to a simple question.
What is your plan for the population of greyhounds, once you have gotten the thing you wished for, and once all the people in racing, who breed, raise care for the dogs have been disenfranchised?
There are probably about 60-70K NGA greyhounds at some stage of their racing/breeding careers currently residing in the USA. What becomes of them, and what is your specific solution to the problem of dealing with an entire population of greyhounds who now have no financial support?
Furthermore, what is your plan to preserve the crucial strains, families and bloodlines of the NGA greyhound, which, for almost 100 years now, has adapted entirely, right down to the zygote, to the inputs and feedback of racing, and for which racing is the sole means of its support?
So before we can have any sort of meaningful or reasoned discussion with those who have no answers to these questions, it is incumbent upon THEM to provide those answers. Book, chapter and verse--not only as a matter of basic and humane breed husbandry, but as a matter of breed custodianship.
Activism, if it is to have any real value, must be more than just a scorched-earth, slash and burn venting of hatred, prejudice, culturism and ignorance.
copyright, 2014
Controversy is the name of game when the word greyhound is mentioned. I can't think of any other canine subject that has generated more misinformation, more misunderstanding and more unthinking prejudice.
Frankly, I don't blame anyone for not liking a particular form of sporting competition. I don't like golf. It looks like a nice way to spoil a good walk, as far as I'm concerned. So I give golf the thumbs down. It's boring, it's tedious, the whispering of the announcers is obsequious, and some of the athletes look as if they couldn't do a chin up while standing on a step-stool. What I don't have the gall to do is to say that simply playing golf for a living makes all golfers joke athletes, incorrigible boozehounds, degenerate gamblers and serial womanizers, just because a few of them are.
But that sort of broad-brush tar and feathering is the essence of the AR movement. Be that as it may, what I never hear from anyone who is a vocal critic of racing, is the answer to a simple question.
What is your plan for the population of greyhounds, once you have gotten the thing you wished for, and once all the people in racing, who breed, raise care for the dogs have been disenfranchised?
There are probably about 60-70K NGA greyhounds at some stage of their racing/breeding careers currently residing in the USA. What becomes of them, and what is your specific solution to the problem of dealing with an entire population of greyhounds who now have no financial support?
Furthermore, what is your plan to preserve the crucial strains, families and bloodlines of the NGA greyhound, which, for almost 100 years now, has adapted entirely, right down to the zygote, to the inputs and feedback of racing, and for which racing is the sole means of its support?
So before we can have any sort of meaningful or reasoned discussion with those who have no answers to these questions, it is incumbent upon THEM to provide those answers. Book, chapter and verse--not only as a matter of basic and humane breed husbandry, but as a matter of breed custodianship.
Activism, if it is to have any real value, must be more than just a scorched-earth, slash and burn venting of hatred, prejudice, culturism and ignorance.
copyright, 2014