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Chris Morris / Special to the Sun
Monday, March 22, 2010 | 2 a.m.
The national convention of the American Greyhound Track Owners Association that starts today at Caesars Palace will include a sober accounting of the industry’s latest victims — and the intractable problems that will contribute to future closures.
Each year attendance drops at the convention. This year’s gathering is expected to draw about 120 people. Fifteen years ago the tally was upwards of 400.
The industry is in such rapid decline that a growing number of dog track owners are finding common ground with animal rights groups hoping to put live dog racing out of its misery.
In Iowa, for example, Harrah’s Entertainment is trying to outlaw part of its gambling business and is willing to pay the state $7 million a year for the privilege.
More than half of the nation’s greyhound tracks have closed for lack of business in the past three decades. Four closed last year alone, leaving some states without any live dog racing.
Although profits are down for many companies because of the recession, track owners are fighting to stay alive in the face of competition from casinos, an unsympathetic public uncomfortable with the concept of racing dogs for sport and state legislatures seeking more tax dollars from gambling to fill budget gaps.
But most of all, they are battling time itself.
“It’s a different era now than it was 40 and 50 years ago,” says Karen Keelan, association president and owner of a New Hampshire track that stopped live dog racing in 2008 and offers wagering on simulcast races. “The entertainment ideal is different today. There are so many things for people to do in their spare time. And everything’s quicker, with the Internet and social networking.”
Keelan, who began working at her father’s track after college, is trying to keep her family business alive after selling a Connecticut track in 2006 that couldn’t compete with the nearby giant Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos.
The situation is more dire for kennel and dog owners who don’t have land to sell or the chance to profit from casinos like gambling companies do. Many are choosing to retire as tracks are phased out or have moved kennels and dogs to other states where prospects are somewhat brighter.
Among them is Fred Fulchino, owner of Regall Sports Kennel in Connecticut. At 44, he’s not ready to exit the business.
Instead, he has moved his 75 dogs to Florida, where they race at the Mardi Gras racetrack near Hollywood, which is subsidized by an adjacent casino.
Like Keelan, Fulchino is a realist.
“People want instant gratification,” Fulchino said. “They want to put in three dollars, pull a lever and win $10,000. They’re not happy winning $500 like the old-timer handicappers did by studying racing forms.”
Gamblers have wagered on greyhounds in the United States since at least 1925, when Derby Lane opened for business in St. Petersburg — and Florida remains the state with the most greyhound tracks — but by the 1970s there were many tracks in other states.
The beginning of the end for greyhound racing began in the 1980s and 1990s with the introduction of state lotteries and especially casinos with Las Vegas-style gambling and flashy slot machines. Wagering on greyhound races in the United States has declined from $3.5 billion in 1991 to $1.1 billion in 2007, according to the Association of Racing Commissioners. This 68 percent decline has been sure and steady. More than half of the greyhound tracks that were operating in the late 1980s and early 1990s have since closed.
The continued decline in dog racing has become even more painful for casino owners who are required to subsidize the tracks as a condition of operating casinos with slot machines.
Casino gambling would not exist in many states but for dog and horse tracks and their financial problems. Over the past two decades, several states legalized casinos at the site of dog and horse tracks for the stated purpose of subsidizing these businesses with slot machine profits.
Among them was Iowa, the first state to legalize riverboat gambling. Years after gambling boats began operating there in 1991, the state — in an attempt to prop up a well-entrenched agricultural economy dependent on the feeding, breeding and racing of greyhounds — established rules requiring casinos with dog tracks to offer a certain number of races per year.
Harrah’s, which commissioned a study this year that attempts to quantify the amount of such subsidies, says the setup doesn’t make economic sense for business or the state.
Instead of diverting $12 million a year in slot revenue to supplement the prize money divided up among dog owners and breeders, Iowa’s two casinos with greyhound tracks want to pay the state $10 million a year. Dog owners and breeders say that money wouldn’t come close to the economic loss of an entire industry, with its trickle-down effect on retailers and consumers.
Still, Harrah’s calls greyhound racing a giant waste of money and resources — including real estate that could be used for more profitable enterprises.
“It’s like a horse and buggy manufacturer getting a subsidy from an auto manufacturer,” Harrah’s spokesman Gary Thompson says. “We’re subsidizing a dying business.”
Using slot money to support tracks never made much economic sense to begin with, though racetrack casinos were more politically palatable at the time, adds Jan Jones, the company’s senior vice president of communications and government relations.
“Horse and dog breeders have their share of political influence,” Jones says. “There were jobs at stake. And these facilities existed to begin with. It just seemed easier to put slots where betting was already taking place.”
According to the Harrah’s study, greyhound owners and kennels competing in Iowa have received $140 million in casino revenue since the subsidy was initiated in 1995, with 42 percent of the money going to owners and kennels in other states.
“We’re losing money and the state is losing money,” Jones says. “And we’re not seeing a lot of young customers getting into greyhound racing.”
In recent years, several tracks unable to open casinos on their property have closed. Meanwhile, other tracks without slots are hanging on in the hope that they will be allowed to offer the machines in time to save their businesses. For these casino hopefuls, greyhound tracks will function much like the few bingo games left in Las Vegas Strip resorts: They will be cultural curiosities or something to do with the grandparents on a Sunday afternoon.
“The product became an antique. We were an 8-track cassette store in a world of CDs,” laments Roy Berger, executive vice president of the Dairyland Greyhound Park in Wisconsin, which closed last year after sustaining $17 million in losses over five years.
After Wisconsin legalized pari-mutuel betting on races and a lottery in 1988, Indian tribes built casinos on reservation land with the blessing of the federal government, which said tribes were entitled to offer gambling games of their own. Racetrack owners fought the tribes in court and lost. They also attempted to build casinos themselves but to no avail — the state wasn’t eager to approve Las Vegas-style casinos on nontribal lands.
“It’s extremely unfair that the Native American casinos have a monopoly on this product,” Berger complains. “It’s like operating a grocery store next to another store that opens down the block with a different kind of beer or soda that we’re prohibited from selling.”
Such is the crazy-quilt patchwork of state gambling laws that have opened the door to tribal casinos while prohibiting slot machines for nontribal entities that lack public support and require voter approval for casino gambling. In spite of the continued spread of casinos nationwide, many people, especially in socially conservative communities, don’t want to live near them.
Unlike many of her peers, Keelan doesn’t believe slot machines at greyhound tracks are the answer to survival.
A Rhode Island track, Lincoln, has declared bankruptcy even after being able to simulcast races and add slot machines.
“Sometimes the payback isn’t there,” Keelan says. “With the downturn, it’s hard to keep up with what makes people happy anymore.”
Grey2K USA video
Increasingly, track owners are confiding in a former enemy, a national greyhound advocacy group called Grey2K USA.
The Boston-based nonprofit, which aims to outlaw greyhound racing, backed a successful ballot measure in 2008 to end greyhound racing in Massachusetts and is expected to win a similar fight in Rhode Island, where the Twin River track seeks to end live racing as part of a bankruptcy court agreement. Track owners in New Hampshire and Colorado have already lobbied lawmakers to give up live racing and instead offer simulcast races.
“It’s so odd to be agreeing with people who have spent millions fighting you after so many years,” says Carey Theil, executive director of Grey2K USA. “It’s like ‘Alice in Wonderland.’”
Coupled with the economic argument against greyhound racing is a shift in public opinion against racing dogs for sport, Theil says.
His organization has helped shape public opinion with devastating videos, using race footage broadcast by the tracks for gambling purposes, showing dogs injured during races. The group has cross-referenced videos with publicly available statistics on dog injuries to determine the identities of hurt dogs, including the dogs’ names and what they look like.
Track owners say they are doing their best to care for their dogs. Mistreating greyhounds isn’t tolerated like it was decades ago, while the vast majority of dogs are adopted out after racing for a few years.
“These are athletes. They live in air-conditioned buildings and are exercised frequently. They’re on strict diets. They’re massaged and given whirlpool baths,” Richard Winning, vice president of Derby Lane, says.
Still, even standard practices such as keeping dogs in cages, muzzling them and leading them out for exercise and back into their crates don’t sit well with some people.
Even Harrah’s, accustomed to doing battle with community activists as the nation’s largest and most geographically diverse casino operator, isn’t entirely comfortable with the continued practice of racing animals that many consumers consider pets.
“We’re not sure this is a business we want to be in,” Jones says. It would be disingenuous, however, to say the company is motivated by altruism for the dogs, she adds.
Keenly aware of the public’s declining interest in dog racing and animal rights concerns, Isadore Havenick, 32, sees a potential solution: The third-generation greyhound track operator wants to reduce the number of races he is required to offer at his family’s Flagler Dog Track in Miami and a second track in Naples. Florida tracks with casinos have different racing requirements that are built into state law.
“When people ask what I do I say I work in a casino,” says Havenick, who opened the Magic City casino next to the Flagler track in October. When the dogs aren’t running, the track hosts concerts for casino customers.
“We lose money on dog racing every day,” he adds.
Winning, whose great-grandfather founded the U.S.’ first greyhound track, holds onto to hope that dog racing will make a comeback and retain a permanent, though smaller, place in the gambling industry.
After all, Winning says, “Everyone thought disco was dead but it came back.”
Dog racing is barbaric! It should be eliminated!
Put the "sick dog" down and end it's misery (pun intended).
Put dog racing and Harrah's out of business.
"...the vast majority of dogs are adopted out after racing for a few years."
ARE YOU KIDDING?!
Who came up with THAT absurdity, and why did Liz Bentson choose to report it AS FACT? It is well known that the few dogs lucky enough to be "adopted out" represent only a small fraction of American racing greyhounds. What happens to the thousands of less fortunate ones?
Check out the National Geographic Special video to find out.
You'll see that they're not enjoying their "strict diets" and "whirlpool baths" as this cruel industry would have you believe.
120 is not a convention it is a meeting.
Sorry Karen and Fred, you are still living in a delusion if you think the decline is because of social networking and instant gratification.
"...an unsympathetic public uncomfortable with the concept of racing dogs for sport..."
This says it all.
Dog racing is an inherently cruel industry from the over-breeding, to the caging of dogs for up to 20 hours a day to the racing where they suffer injuries like broken bones, cardiac arrest, paralysis and death. The slow dogs, well, I think lots of folks now know the reality of the mass graves exposing dogs shot in the neck or head for ten bucks each.
Dogs are an important part of our lives and deserve to be protected.
The end of greyhound racing cannot come a moment too soon.
Every day, as the rest of us go about our business, racing greyhounds are confined to small cages for 20+ hours a day, fed disgusting 4-D meat, shot up with steroids, are injured or killed while racing.
Every day, as the rest of us are having fun with our pets, racing greyhounds that are too slow or too injured to make another buck are disappearing.
Every day, as the rest of us are working hard to earn a living, racing greyhound owners/breeders are using defenseless animals to earn themselves a buck.
Think about it. Think about it every day.
case i been thinking about it. So u telling everyone that u dont eat meat, chicken, pork,fish,or hunt. Stop being such a hypocite and get the facts. By the way my kids are having fun playin with the greyhounds all day long while u workin and leavin your pets home alone everyday.
Sorry, Mr. Winning - but dead dogs ain't disco.
Dog racing is going the way of untold thousands of innocent greyhounds - a slow, tortuous death.
Shame on every person who is fighting to keep this horrible industry alive, and shame on every person who supports it in any way. Every person who places a bet at a dog track is personally signing a greyhound's death warrant.
Dog racing must end!
I was watching dog racing from Derby Lane at a Stations casino yesterday, and it started me thinking. What happens when a greyhound slows down, or gets injured? Do they have retirement or adoption facilities for them? Maybe up in Massachusetts, where they have totally shut down Wonderland and Raynham, their last tracks. But we all know they are turned into dog food at the age of 4. Pitiful...
And I think about the dog tracks I have visited over the years:
Southland in Arkansas, where you pay one dollar to get into the clubhouse. Totally white, downstairs was totally black.
Topeka, where on Super Bowl Sunday, they ran 15 races in front of 100 people max.
Raynham, where the people only cared about buying lottery tickets and watching horse races.
It's great that dog racing is going, going, gone. Do you really think dogs are adoptable after their horrible life? They do in Massachusetts, but we all know how nutty they are.
Now let's talk about the most corrupt sport. Florida Jai Lai. It's dead too. They have slots now, so they live on like a vampire who won't die. Sad...
Good article, LV Sun. Great relentless work, Grey2K USA - - you have tremendous public support and it's wonderful to hear that track owners are wising up and getting on board.
To 'nednougat' -
Please don't sell greyhound adoption short!
Actually, by some miracle, retired racers make phenomenal companions after their so-called careers are over. Some do need rehabilitation from poor treatment, and all need patience from their adoptive owners during their transition from years of life at the tracks to life in a home, but remarkably most make wonderful pets. They are sensitive, loving, intuitive and eager to please. Most are extraordinarily patient, loving and affectionate.
Thousands of greyhounds need homes every year after they are done racing. I encourage the readers of this article to seriously consider adopting a retired racing greyhound one day. They are wonderful dogs.
As a former trainer around the Southwest mostly AZ, I can tell you I still have nightmares about some of the stuff I saw. This sport cannot end soon enough. The more the tracks loose money, the badder the conditions for the dogs. You greyhound folks time to go find some new guilt less jobs.
boo dog racing, huray bull fighting!
I don't know how many of you ever worked in a racing kennel, but the idea that dogs are crated for 20 hours a day is laughable to those of us who have. No way do I ever think you were ever a trainer,formertrainer. The dogs are exercised and turned out, during the course of the day, and after the night's racing. They are groomed, whirl-pooled, rubbed down, walked and otherwise fussed over far more than all but the most coddled of pets. That's one of the immutable cause and effects leading to their incredible popularity as congenial pets. So, before you make foolish statements that have no basis in the actual reality of a trainer's life, or of a racing greyhound's life----try putting in an 18 hour day in a 50 dog racing kennel. The idea that racing is cruel, to a breed that began its evolution in nature, approximately 100,000 years ago, as wild coursers of game, and then upon befriending men, became domesticated coursers of game---- and which has subsequently been bred specifically for track racing, since before the Great Depression, is confounding to anyone who has the slightest knowledge of, or experience with, or real empathy for these amazing dogs. They love to race. Every cell in their body is imbued with the genetics, the instincts and the collective consciousness of the hunter and the chaser. The ultimate cruelty would be to deprive them of their visceral and instinctive need to "hunt", to chase and to compete----as they did, to survive, for most of their 100,000 years before track racing. At this point in time, track racing is the only thing that financially supports and preserves the functional, remaining greyhound families, which have existed since they branched off from the grey wolf, eons ago. Once racing ends, and these bloodlines and these ancient greyhound families fall into extinction, they are lost forever. We won't see them again. When deciding the fate of a 100,000 year old breed, is whether or not the racing population of them, is better off or worse off than canines in the general population. There is no cruelty that has ever befallen a racing greyhound, that hasn't occurred among canines in the general population, thousands of times moreover. Today, ASPCAs and shelters in the USA, euthanize multiple-millions of unwanted, neglected, abandoned or abused, dogs each year. Dogs who suffer unthinkable cruelties, or simply unconscionable disregard. And those are only the ones we know about. Greyhounds, as a population, are extremely valuable to their owners. In most cases, the owner's and trainer's well being and that of their family, is contingent upon the well being of their greyhounds. This is simply not a situation that lends itself to either rampant cruelty or casual abuse.
Since when has any species of animal benefitted from the word 'Industry' associated with it?
Smoke very well stated. Many people get on these sites about greyhound racing and talk all this smack about treatment and don't have a damn clue. Or they are from PETA in disguise. They saw a TV special many years ago from a puppy farm run by some bad people and the entire industry treats the dogs that way? Insane! There are bad people in all industries folks. Do people realize that if the dogs are not well taken care of that they can't perform well and the owners/kennels dont make money. So will they treat them bad and run 7th or treat them great and try to win and have a living? The answer seems fairly clear. By the way, I have adpoted 2 retired greyhounds from 2 different tracks and the dogs are amazing. They are great with people and especially kids. And for the guy who said they can't adapt, you can't be more incorrect. Honestly.
How many dog tracks are left? When I lived in Phoenix 30 years ago, there was a track that was popular. Another one opened west of town, but closed shortly after and sat decaying for years.
I never went. but was somewhat interested in going once just to see it and make a bet or 2.
I have worked in multiple tracks as a veterinarian and there is nothing particularly good about greyhound racing as it currently exists.The potential exists for it to be a viable and humane sport yet as it stands now anyone who can speak positively about greyhound racing is an ignoramous!
What truly gets me about the proponents of this "sport" are three things - It's automatically assumed that anyone against racing hangs on the words of and/or are supporters of PETA, the HSUS and Grey2K. Here's a newsflash: It's not so. The documented abuses that have been going on for YEARS don't require the intervention of radical groups to be made known to the public. Anyone capable of reading a newspaper or turning on the news can come to the same conclusions. Secondly, every time those who are against racing say so, the racing community reiterates ad nauseum that pets are abused, neglected and killed every day. That certainly doesn't make Greyhound abuses and deaths ok with me, and they're incredibly foolish to think it would. The average pet probably hadn't been born to make money for years for someone as the Greyhounds are. As long as owners of these dogs continue to breed and send their dogs to low end tracks knowing they'll be killed, racing will continue to be abhorrent to most. As long as owners have the option of sending dogs to Mexico to make a few more bucks off them, people will be repulsed. As long as dogs will be sent back to breeding farms, for yet another money making "career", to spend their remaining time with little concern for their health and age, people won't rally for racing. It's truly remarkable that some believe a revival is possible. Casinos and the economy are just part of the reason racing is a sinking ship. Lastly, to argue that those involved in racing will lose their jobs if racing ends, as was done in MA, is beyond pointless. Those involved need to get a GED and find another line of work that doesn't involve the suffering and unnecessary deaths of these gentle dogs. These people have a choice, unlike the dogs they exploit.
I guess some of you disgruntled posters must have got the ax when they closed the track here..
Smoke, are you trying to say that a 100,000 yr old(I didn't know they were that old!) breed will become extinct because of the end of a 100 yr old industry?
And there is not going to be ONE greyhound farmer left in this country willing to breed for pets? (Then I'll take the last unfixed male and female and breed them for pets. No worries).
And why is it whenever something comes up against the racing industry they ALWAYS bring up the dogs in shelters dying and food animals dying?
First, there will be less shelter animals dying if there are no more greyhounds to adopt (didn't you say that they would become extinct?).
Second, you are comparing entertainment to survival. People need to eat. They don't need to watch a dog run around a track.
And as far as greyhounds loving to run, guess what, just about all living things like to run. JRTs like to run. Baby calves like to run. Elephants run. Humans runs. Cock roaches run........get my point?
The only reason greyhound race is because man could domesticate this gentle animal and make money from it.
Hey "smoke",
Thanks for the laughs, 100,000 years old, LOL.
You failed to mention the thousands of dogs that get hurt or killed on the track every year.
You failed to mention the large number of greyhounds that are killed every year when they are no longer "useful".
You failed to mention that lovely 4D meat.
You failed to mention the injection of steroids and whatever else the trainers decide to shoot into the dogs.
Overall I would say that you fail!
HI does anyone know where I can get ahold of
Fred Fulchino , I adopted a dog from his Kennel a couple of years ago and I wanted to update him on the dog, Thanks In advance
The dog was awesome and we had no issues and we could tell it was very loved!!
v_star_gal@hotmail.com