POV: Speaking up for the Silent Majority (Abbie MacGregor)

Abbie MacGregor shares her view on how the greyhound racing community can build a powerful case to take to Westminster in the face of political pressure…

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The debate around greyhound racing increasingly suffers from a modern political problem: the assumption that the loudest voices automatically represent the settled view of the public. They often do not.

Highly organised activist groups are extremely effective at creating pressure, media attention and political nervousness. But intensity of opinion is not the same thing as majority opinion, or indeed, legitimate facts.

Perfection cannot be the threshold for legitimacy. No sport, industry or institution is perfect. The real question is whether standards are high, welfare is improving, bad practice is dealt with robustly, and the overwhelming majority of people involved are acting responsibly and in good faith.

Greyhound racing in Britain can confidently make that case.

So called ‘animal rights’ activists who campaign against greyhound racing are motivated more by dog whistles to their extremist friends than dog loving.

The latest fairytale nonsense from Animal Aid showed a list of dogs who apparently had gone missing from racing, with the intended implication that these dogs had met a terrible end. Incredibly the once respectable RSPCA – now sadly also hijacked by extremists – decided to give credence to this nonsense. This led to greyhound owners and trainers flooding social media with pictures of these “missing” greyhounds enjoying life either in retirement or taking a break from racing.

While activists were building point-scoring websites and generating faux outrage on social media, thousands of trainers, owners, racing staff and welfare professionals were doing what they do every single day – feeding, walking, rehabilitating, transporting and caring for their dogs. That contrast matters.

But it also has to recognise a difficult reality: simply saying those things is no longer enough.

Most people never witness the care trainers have for their dogs. They do not see retired greyhounds thriving in homes. They do not see the emotional attachment owners and racing staff have to the animals in their care.

Instead, they see headlines, edited clips and activist messaging.

That is why the sport now has to stop relying purely on rebuttal and become far more confident in showing the reality of modern greyhound racing to the outside world. The answer is not endless defensiveness, but visibility.

Take greyhounds into public spaces, like village fetes, transport hubs, shopping centres; make racetracks more a part of the towns and cities they are in; and get heavily involved with the wider 12 million-strong dog-owning community. Unleash our highly qualified veterinary staff on social media to explain the importance of understanding what greyhounds want and need on their terms, not ours. The real welfare question cannot be allowed to be whether a human feels emotionally uncomfortable watching a dog race. It should be whether the dog is healthy, stimulated, well cared for and able to express its natural behaviours safely.

In short: we need to show, not tell.

That means the GBGB and the wider industry have to do exactly what we did in responding to the baseless claims of the Animal Aid website. But we have to do it day in and day out, provocatively and convincingly – to the public, to politicians, to charities. Because the irony is that greyhound racing already possesses the very thing many sports and industries would envy – a genuinely passionate community built around animals the vast majority of the public instinctively love.

The events of the last few days have actually demonstrated that strength clearly. Faced with yet another coordinated attack, the sport pulled together. Trainers, owners and supporters pushed back confidently, and caused the RSPCA to publicly retreat.

Britain has long been a dog-loving, sport-loving nation, and greyhound racing has a powerful story to tell – it just has to become better at showing it.

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