I’ve been dreading this post so let’s get the obvious out of the way first: I got into a lot of trouble for planning this activity and I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t thinking… I was only looking for a uniquely Irish event that was not available elsewhere in the world and Greyhound Racing is not something that we’ve ever experienced.
I didn’t realize I’d opened a can of worms and would get my ass kicked by everyone including my 8-year old daughter who is a burgeoning animal activist and didn’t approve of an activity that had the potential to lead to animal cruelty. And, like the bull run in Spain, at some point, all of the drunken craziness at the expense of animals made me really uncomfortable.
As such, because we attended the event, we made a vow to help out any one of the many Greyhound charities or adopt one of the racing greyhounds that end up in Canada to keep them from being sold to European countries like Spain.
All this said, Greyhound racing is hugely popular in Ireland and the race we attended was packed to the rafters. Not everyone in Ireland approves of the races or the gambling. Our cab driver was one of them and at the colosseum, he scorned the other taxi drivers who stepped inside to place bets. Others I spoke to said it was a “terrible terrible thing.”
I still think it was interesting to see how the racing works and if we’d gambled I would have made a killing because all of the dogs that I picked (based on a logical pattern) were in the Top 3 spots. In hindsight, what we should have done was gambled and then donated all the money back to a charity like the Greyhound Sanctuary.
