4

Who is a Greyhound? Reflections on the Non-Human Digital Archive

Susan Nance

Here is a puzzle: As a historian of animals, how can I write historically about the recent past of a specific group of non-human animals? In this case, my group consists of dogs caught up in greyhound breeding, racing, and adoption in the United States and Canada since 1990. I seek to document their stories since they are among only a few dogs custom bred for commercial use (as racers) and, when they are no longer profitable, they are asked to transition into private households to serve as companions.1 Beyond documenting these dogs’ lives and labour simply because they lived, which is a political choice grounded in an animal rights advocacy perspective, I seek to tell their stories since greyhounds have been largely unique among dogs in straddling the commercial sporting and consumer petkeeping worlds. (Beagles adopted from scientific research facilities and pit bulls removed from wagered fighting operations are similar but less numerous examples.) As animals purpose-bred to perform at a commercial dog track, where they are group-housed and tended by a series of trainers and kennel staff, then later adopted into private homes, they must adapt to two very different settings. The contrast between the institutional and private settings has become increasingly obvious to the public in the era of “multi-species families.” That is, since the late-twentieth century, consumers, veterinarians, and pet product manufacturers have deemed companion animals as beings who should and do shape domestic life since human owners believe dogs’ needs are equal, or nearly so, to those of human members of the household.2 The historical experiences of greyhounds can tell us how an industrially produced animal came to shape human life in a non-monetized role in that larger context.

The difficulty in finding primary sources that document the lives of dogs in the recent past is two pronged. Firstly, dog racing is a topic essentially ignored by the kinds of archives that one might suspect would document it. For instance, the National Sporting Library, focused on elite horse racing, and the Library of Congress, with its vast international mandate, so far exclude this topic. Even in states that have hosted dog tracks or dog breeding farms, institutions like the Kansas State Archives or the Florida Historical Society have very little: a promotional postcard or two online, or a few holdings of state committee proceedings and legislation related to parimutuel wagering, or perhaps in a folder in their vertical files some old newspaper clippings or a few odd brochures from a long-defunct local dog track. Such materials remain, not to document dogs or people who built the sport, but as a record of state regulatory activity and efforts to promote that economic sector. Certainly, it is a truism in the work of animal history that people design, fund, and build public archives to create a record of human agency, telling the story of material donors or the entity funding the archive. Government records of wagering legislation or dog track promotional items are in typical form—where in those documents will we learn what it was like to be one of the dogs who made that industry possible but was later asked to adapt to a private household?

Secondly, the materials that do exist may be difficult or impossible to access since they are held by private individuals or groups, such as the National Greyhound Hall of Fame in Abilene, Kansas. That section of the Great Plains has been the geographical heart of greyhound breeding and racing in the US for a century. I have visited the materials in the basement storeroom at the Hall of Fame four times to find a collection, as Harriet Ritvo puts it, “not necessarily in a setting that is recognizably archival.”3 Each time I was aided by the helpful and knowledgeable staff there whose memories house all the institutional knowledge needed to interpret their holdings—who donated which item, what dogs they owned, where their farm was. Yet the Hall of Fame may be an endangered industry institution and its collections have an uncertain future. The community of dog breeders, trainers, track operators, and racing fans that the Hall of Fame has served since the early 1960s is dwindling (along with the facility’s sources of funding) as the industry contracts, with tracks continuing to shut down, state by state. Equally, pro-racing advocates can be suspicious of outsiders. Only at their convenience do I visit their filing cabinets of photos and racetrack programs, shelves sagging under the weight of old studbooks, back issues of Greyhound Racing Record, and dozens of dust-coated trophies donated by industry families over the decades. Moreover, although their storeroom holds many important sources for the period before large-scale ex-racer adoption began in 1990, critical documentation from more recent decades is sequestered in the private files of the racing greyhound registry organization, the National Greyhound Association, at their offices on the other side of that Kansas town.

Thus, perhaps I need to build my own archive? Research by Lynda Birke on lab rodents actually helps us understand this archival conundrum and its importance to historians of animals. In dog racing’s institutional settings at greyhound breeding farms and dog tracks, like in laboratories with rats and mice, people work to turn greyhounds into data, namely race finish statistics and stud tables, and if possible producers of puppies to feed the system.4 It is no accident that the industry website charting race results and lineages resides at www.greyhound-data.com. People involved with the industry take greyhound lineages as records of the work of their human engineers. No less than the horses Sandra Swart and Lindsay Stallones Marshall discuss in this volume, these dogs’ very bodies are archives of that human labour, an analysis of which would require deep study of graphic records of how dogs looked and moved in league with the studbooks and industry accounts of the human work of matching sires with dams, different tools than I employ here. At the same time, I see those greyhound bodies as evidence, not simply of countless hours of labour and ingenuity by breeders and trainers, but also as evidence of decades of short-sightedness in mass breeding dogs for a gaming industry chronically operating in the red, with no intention of breeding them for their own genetic health and, until comparatively recently, no plan for allowing them to grow old.5 Yet, unlike what Birke terms the “many millions of rats and mice . . . used annually in the service of science, [of whom] we know remarkably little about their characteristics as species,” we actually know quite a lot about the behaviour and needs of greyhounds from various scientific discourses and, not least, the thousands of self-reporting greyhound trainers, adoption groups (pro- and anti-racing), veterinarians, and adopters who work and live with dogs from the industry.6

What was it like to be a dog raised in the greyhound breeding and racing business, then released at age two or five or eight years into life as a household companion? What might the history of those greyhound lives and transitions tell us about the decline of dog racing in the United States or about the history and development of animal advocacy movements in the digital age? These are some of the questions we must hurry to investigate before the seemingly limitless sources that might elucidate them disappear. This is a paradox of what Ian Milligan has called “the age of information abundance.” It is, he says, a “revolutionary shift we are witnessing as historians,” wherein traces of people’s lives that throughout human history before the 1990s were seldom or never recorded are now a flood of “born-digital text . . . [a] constellation of text that we can now preserve, alongside increasing numbers of images, videos, sounds, and beyond.”7

Digital sources can supply a counterpoint or confirmation to the kinds of reporting codified in industry-defences of dog management or proscriptive books of adoption advice by both pro-racing and anti-racing veterinarians and adoption advocates. They also provide a diversity of graphic and video evidence of dogs and their behaviours, plus countless detailed, first-hand accounts of these dogs in different settings—crowdsourced on the Web and social media sites—the likes of which are simply not to be found in documents created before the digital age. (It is overwhelming to me to even imagine having such detailed sources focused on animal behaviour and bodies from the nineteenth century or earlier periods!) To those ready to point out the problems and questions with these ephemeral sources, those who question the motives of the people who initiated them, or those who say that we should halt the analysis because there is too much risk of misunderstanding historical animals and their people, or that we will be tempted to impose subjective attitudes on historical animals who are ultimately unknowable, I ask: What is the risk if we do not try? These seemingly trivial or subjective sources abound in the digital age: for these greyhounds, they may be the only sources documenting their lives.

Digital Primary Sources and Dogs

To find evidence of greyhound lives and transitions, since 2007, I have been building an archive of materials, gathered from Google alerts and news, Facebook pages, email lists, industry and advocacy blogs and websites, as well as personal correspondence with greyhound people. It has required that at times I become an anthropologist or quasi-participant in order to be in the room, so to speak. One must be immersed in such digital sources for a long time in order to wade through such information and decide how to use it, understand why people are posting it, and know who else probably saw it.

One might employ scripts and bots to scrape large amounts of data from websites and other digital places as quantitative historians do to learn things that numerical or statistical data can show. In a manner similar to Sean Kheraj’s analysis of the movement of the 1871 equine epizootic, I can imagine using the records of races and online studbooks before and after the advent of adoption programs for ex-racing greyhounds to chart the rise and fall of numbers of dogs registered by the NGA (National Greyhound Association) and map out the circulation of dogs on the continent as a commercial population.8 Yet, in such an approach, the individual stories of dogs and people would be obscured, or one might inadvertently collect information that would be unethical to employ because its original authors created it with an expectation of limited or complete privacy.9 Instead, I have captured hundreds of examples manually, one at a time, downloading PDFs and MP4 files, or cutting out screenshots with Apple’s Preview software to create PNG and JPG files of webpages. By not employing software to harvest massive amounts of data, I can collect and cite only sources that are ethical to show and analyze. These items are “surrogates” for the originals and capture what users saw at a precise moment in time, such as social media posts or news items with comments sections that change over time.10 I intend for these screenshots, PDFs, and other items to ultimately reside in an online archive so that users can interact with them in ways similar to paper-based collections. Historians often rely on original collectors and donors of materials to assemble related items together and in doing so make clear how individual items help explain other items in the same collection, forming a network of evidence and information.

In a way, as a collector of digital ephemera, my work is like that of the old scrapbook keepers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who put newspaper clippings, photos, keepsakes, and souvenirs into inexpensive paper scrapbooks, which were organized according to their own interests and logic. Likewise, the trade-off is that readers and fellow scholars must trust my judgement in presenting typical sources and case studies that illustrate broader patterns that I have seen in the sources (and not “cherry picking” evidence) simply because I have been immersed in them for over a decade. “Sources don’t speak for themselves,” Trevor Owens and Thomas Padilla remind us in exploring how digital sources require an understanding of historical technological context—who created them, how, why, and in what ways algorithms, screen resolutions, and other hardware and software issues shaped what people could create and how it was displayed or stored.11 As they note, the fragility of digital sources comes not simply from the complacency that their current abundance may inspire in us, or from neglect or forgetfulness as sites go untended over time, passwords are forgotten, digital hosting companies go out of business. The fragility is also a political fragility. Some things are taken down or deleted later because they are deemed no longer appropriate or relevant, or they are perceived to be detrimental to an industry that imagines itself under attack by outsiders who will misconstrue any bit of bad news, no matter how factual. Likewise, online content may be censored in a way if it is protected by passwords or other barriers that limit who can see what posts and that give for-profit companies the final say over access and retention of materials.12

At the same time, in contrast to the interviews collected by oral historians, these digital sources allow us to listen in without disturbing the conversation and to see people candidly discussing what is important to them, or posturing for one another, such as it may be. This is not to say that we discover “the truth” (no historian takes any primary source that way). However, today the American dog track industry is collapsing due to broad public distaste for the sport and decades of declining revenues, with only two tracks expected to be in operation for the 2023 season from a network that at its peak featured over fifty tracks nationwide. Industry insiders feel utterly under siege, many believing that false information spread by critics destroyed the industry, not competition from casinos and other economic factors. Many informants are thus wary of divulging information to strangers. In some cases, as Jason Colby shows elsewhere in this volume, oral history and animal history are incompatible if informants in controversial fields of animal use worry the researcher may not write about them in anything but the most glowing and selective ways.13 There are some ethical issues to consider when seeking access to sources, material or oral, if they are not housed in a conventional, non-partisan archive where one can ask for things and not be questioned about why or what one’s main argument will ultimately be.

Born-digital sources and their surrogates offer problems but also crucial opportunities. These powerful but fragile digital sources tell us about greyhounds, their behaviour, and their lives in ways that proscriptive literature, pro- or anti-industry sources, and journalism about the industry conceal or ignore when generalizing about NGA greyhounds. They tell us about day-to-day living and realities, about people’s actual experience and practice with greyhounds rather than just their intentions, and behaviour and experience among dogs who made the transition into a multi-species family and shaped the nature of those relationships.

Greyhounds and Dog Tracks: Historical Context from Traditional Sources, Mostly

Sighthounds looking and behaving similarly to NGA greyhounds have existed for millennia. Greyhounds are among a whole range of lithe dogs with elongated muzzles, a group that includes the Saluki, Whippet, Borzoi, Scottish Deerhound, Italian greyhound (the toy breed), Galgo Español, and others with varying coats but always the distinctive deep chest, flaring thighs, powerful shoulders, long neck, flexible spine, and superior eyesight. For centuries, men employed these dogs in competitive coursing trials in which rabbits or other game were set loose in a field with two or more dogs while men wagered which dog would catch the creature. In North America, initially dogmen and bettors gathered in informal colonial-era competitions that congealed into organized coursing clubs during the nineteenth century.14

By 1906, breeders formed the NGA (known as the National Coursing Association until 1973) to register dogs and keep studbooks.15 In the 1920s, greyhound history intersected with the histories of wagering and mass consumption in Oklahoma to produce the first commercial dog track employing a mechanical lure, a furry dummy whisked around the track surface on an electrified track. The lure was a humane innovation that meant no rabbits would be killed before spectators during races, although training young racers on remote properties with live lures persisted. That format soon spread across the US, and later to Britain, Ireland, Australia, Macau, and New Zealand.16 Early dog tracks were controversial for various reasons related to the morality and regulation of gambling and the industry’s ties to organized crime. At the time, there was little public concern about the mental and physical well-being of racing greyhounds. Gradually, a nationwide track network proliferated and, especially in mid-twentieth-century Florida, the working and middle classes flocked to dog tracks to gamble, drink, see and be seen in an entertainment context many took to be glamorous and exciting.17

As the tracks spread and an electronic national market for betting on dogs through simulcasting developed, a speculative market for greyhounds that had simmered along for over a century began to boom. Investors and breeders sought out winning dogs by systematic breeding programs, wherein industry insiders bred, employed, and destroyed greyhounds (generally by the age of five, at the most) in an industrial-agriculture-style system where each dog was first and foremost an investment that needed to pay for itself.18 Unlike pet breeds mass produced for the consumer market, people bred greyhounds primarily for performance, not appearance. Still they were vulnerable to practices that left too many dogs with nowhere to go when they could no longer race. If they were adopted, they faced life potentially coping with ailments caused by old injuries, neglect, or genetic manipulation that resulted in dental problems, arthritis, toe corns, and a great likelihood of developing bone cancer.

After the glamour of the 1950s and 1960s faded, revenue and patronage at dog tracks began to decline, which correlated with the industry’s inability to get a lucrative contract for television broadcasts just as customers began turning to other forms of sports betting, state lotteries, and casinos packed with slot machines. The industry responded with uncoordinated lobbying for the opening of new tracks to create the appearance of growth. The rush to fill the kennels at those new tracks drove a speculative mass breeding of greyhounds, some of them churned out at Florida or Kansas “mega-farms,” holding many hundreds of dogs each. Soon there was a flood of unproven dogs. Only about thirty per cent made it to the track, with some spending only a short time there before being graded out and killed at the age of one to five.19

Before the 1990s, there was no greyhound adoption community to speak of, and already-burdened city dog shelters and humane societies would have been unable to take in the thousands of ex-racers, even if industry people had sought their help. Each year, kennel operators killed or sold many tens of thousands of NGA dogs that were too slow or injured to earn their keep. Some dogs went to class B dog brokers, whose business it was to collect and sell dogs for scientific experimentation.20 The level of routinized destruction of racers by greyhound breeders and trainers drew criticism, not least from some ambivalent family members. In Australia, where similar practices and tracks proliferated, the step-daughter of one greyhound breeder recalled,

As a young child I was told to keep my mouth shut when I asked where some of my stepfather’s greyhounds had gone. . . . He had taken them out to the bush and shot them in the head. It was awful enough to see them locked in a tiny cage all day every day, only walked twice a day and taken out when it was time for a run . . . but to learn that they had been shot in the head, well, I didn’t understand. These dogs were the most placid, friendly dogs . . . killed to focus money on a faster runner.21

To those who supported the status quo in the industry, cultivating breed and racing community cohesion was more important than any individual dog’s life or experience. For, although members did compete with one another to produce winning dogs or to book lucrative contracts at top tracks, in other ways they were united as a community connected by the work of breeding and monetizing elite dogs. NGA greyhounds were a vehicle for membership in that close-knit community.22 However, by the early 1990s, the escalating scale of breeding and killing clashed with a growing pet culture that challenged the commodification of pet stock and extended consideration to greyhounds as dogs like any other—that is, as potential family members with intrinsic value.

Two decades of damaging media coverage followed documenting the fate of the overwhelming majority of greyhounds in the industry who were killed because they were unprofitable, which in the US was estimated at between 30,000 and 50,000 per year in the 1970s–1990s. Greyhound adoption and anti-racing groups proliferated and, in league with investigative journalists, publicized a number of horrifically graphic but not uncommon cases of greyhounds killed by gunshots discovered in piles and pits in remote properties in Arizona, Florida, Alabama, and New Hampshire. There, some kennel operators had employed the least expensive and low-profile means of disposing of healthy NGA greyhounds, although some veterinarians did euthanize dogs at the track.23 The most assertive anti-racing groups demanded outright abolition and confronted the public with slogans like “They die? You bet. They die” to additionally implicate gamblers in the “wastage” within the industry.24

Regulated at the state level with only a patchwork of unevenly enforced regulations, the industry as a whole displayed resentment toward public oversight, even though dog tracks had long been subsidized by state-funded racing commissions and generous tax breaks.25 For instance, there was long-term resistance to the issuing of public injury and death reports for dogs at any given track. During races, dogs may sprain or break their legs or, if they fall while running at top speed, their necks and backs. Greyhounds at breeding farms also fell under an agricultural exemption for livestock such that anti-cruelty statutes for dogs did not (and still do not) apply to greyhounds—unless they are in an adoptive home. Still, beginning in about 1979, some of the earliest adoption efforts came from within the industry. Dozens of volunteers founded adoption organizations and fundraising schemes to pay the expense of collecting “retired racers” from tracks and farms, housing them until they could be adopted by members of the public.26

The industry continued its slow decline in the 1990s and 2000s nonetheless. The rise of competing entertainment, especially online gaming and Native American–run casinos, offered bettors slot machines or other electronic games that provided instant gratification without the delays between races that were common at the track. Well-maintained, glittering casinos only made the now sparsely attended and often rundown local dog track appear more incongruous and depressing as greyhounds raced before rows of empty bleachers in venues devoid of spectators.27

This is the contentious recent history that many people have in mind when they disagree about whether the fate of the greyhound is tied to, on the one hand, commercial dog tracks, the National Greyhound Association, and the rural breeders and dog traders who supply them, or, on the other hand, the pet keeping community that seeks to maintain greyhounds as a breed outside the gaming industry.

Discovering Greyhounds in Small Spaces, Using Digital Sources

Over the last thirty years, greyhounds have struggled to overcome assumptions about how breed membership, lineage, and early life experience shaped them and their needs, and thus who had the authority to speak for them, provide them an opportunity to express their inborn desires, and be “happy.” Indeed, as much as animal welfare, human identities were at stake when this group of animals transitioned to the role of pet in the care of an “adopter,” who in turn existed within a larger social community of like-minded people who believed dogs should live at leisure. Following Birke, Hockenhull, and Creighton’s research on the ways horse people define themselves by reference to the horses for whom they care,28 in private adoptive homes, no less than at the dog track or puppy farm, people imagine these greyhounds as “abstractions” representing their work with the dogs. In the industry context, the labour consists of turning greyhounds into data and vehicles for community cohesion; in private adoptive homes, the work consists of rehabilitating formerly institutionalized greyhounds to adapt to life outside the track or farm, while incorporating the dogs into family structures and routines in ways that often flatter human adopters as “rescuers.”29

What was it like to be one of the dogs who lived first in institutional settings then in a consumer household, transitioning from group-housed investment to family member and from expression of a breed registry to individual? Here, digital sources are crucial since members of the industry and the adoption community talked constantly about these issues online in often-contentious debates and discussions undergirded by support from or opposition to the industry. The history that follows is drawn from printed and online proscriptive literature from adoption groups and veterinarians, pro-industry narratives about greyhounds on YouTube and public blogs, as well as the well-known online public discussion board GreyTalk.com. In all cases, I chose these sources for their explicit discussion of the typical settings, events, and talk about greyhounds’ transition from track to home, most of which discussions are still viewable online.

Most NGA greyhounds were born on rural farms dedicated to breeding dogs for the race track. Bitches were impregnated using straws of semen purchased from other owners. Brood bitches and puppies spent their first days together in a whelping box—often a kiddie pool—that offered a clean, enclosed space that prevented puppies from wiggling away. The vast majority of pet-bred dogs in those years (and still today) were taken from their mothers as early as seven weeks, while still nursing and physiologically and emotionally vulnerable. By contrast, greyhound pups routinely spent many months with their mother, then moved to group housing with other young hounds, often their siblings. Indeed, until adoption, these dogs spent their whole lives surrounded by other greyhounds, learning to be articulate in canine communication skills and etiquette.

At breeding farms, adult dogs were housed in long, rectangular fenced runs that included a shelter or house, an outdoor space, and (at more highly capitalized operations) mowed grass, which is more sanitary than sand or dirt. There, dogs could sprint, play, and relieve themselves far away from their bedding of hay or shredded paper. Young greyhounds were taught to chase a mechanical lure on a sandy track in an enclosed training pen through various techniques that drew on an inborn prey drive and the ability to run at high speed.30 Those who were too slow were either shot and disposed of in a pit on site or euthanized by a local veterinarian.31 At about eighteen months of age, those who survived were either leased or sold to a kennel operator with a contract to a particular track venue. They travelled in a dog hauler, a vehicle outfitted with small compartments that prevent jostling, to a commercial track. There they usually raced twice per week, earning points and corresponding money for their owners, who shared the earnings with track kennel operators and any partner investors.

At the track venue, housing was substantially different from the farm. A 1990s-era video commissioned by Gulf Greyhound Park in La Marque, Texas, euphemistically explained, “there’s a more businesslike manner expected” from young racers.32 That is, greyhounds’ freedom of movement was restricted and routinized almost entirely in the service of race performance and the staffing levels of a given kennel. At any track, there were multiple cinder-block kennel buildings, collectively housing hundreds of dogs. From the relatively spacious dog run of the farm, greyhounds moved into 31 × 32 × 42–inch or 35 × 36 × 49–inch (depending upon the dog and kennel) stacked metal crates, lined with shredded paper or a removable rectangle of wall-to-wall carpet.33 In these spaces, greyhounds spent up to twenty-two hours per day. Critics argued that the largest dogs were unable to fully stand up in these enclosures and that, if they were suffering diarrhea or other troubles, it was common for dogs to sit in their crates in contact with their mess for hours at a time.34

To many in the industry, there was no other safe way for one or two people to manage fifty or more dogs than by compartmentalizing them in such efficiently arranged containers. Yet, one noted advocate for the industry, Dennis McKeon, explained this practice, not as one of human convenience or financial efficiency, but as one that catered to greyhounds rather than their human managers,

All canines are “denners.” This means that left to their own devices, they will seek out places to sleep and rest that provide close cover and protection, not only from the elements, but from their enemies. . . . Each pack member in the racing kennel has his/her own “den,” which we (and those companies who sell them commercially) refer to as crates, and anti-racing propagandists prefer to call “cages,” for maximum negative connotation.35

The idea of a dog crate or hauler slot as a “den” is an old one but leaves out one critical element: wild canines may choose when to enter a den and how long to remain there. Greyhounds were locked inside their crates until a person released them, so their movement was limited by trainers’ needs or abilities to cope with kennel workload. Still, the idea of the crate as den showed how supporters of racing defined greyhounds’ needs in ways that normalized industry practices.

Beyond the crate, dogs spent a minority of their time in a turn-out pen (while wearing a basket muzzle to prevent injuries from nips and bites), in a long, rectangular training run, or in the jinny pit. This last space is a marshalling area where dogs are dressed in racing silks (numbered jackets), weighed, examined by the track veterinarian, have urine collected for drug testing, and stored in crates near the starting box for up to five hours before race time in order to restrict access by people who might seek to drug the dogs to enhance or impair their performance. Dogs occasionally tested positive for cocaine and other substances designed to enhance or bog down a dog’s performance, nonetheless. Overall, this kind of captivity may have been comparable to many animal shelters, such as those at university or private research institutions that housed dogs for experimental purposes, but it was far better than many commercial breeding facilities (“puppy mills”).

One classic breeder’s account said of the greyhound, “He has been bred for one purpose, and one purpose only—speed, sheer speed.”36 Indeed this has been true, in large part. And yet somehow the range of mental skills and temperament traits selectively bred over the centuries in order to produce dogs who were (most of them) not only capable of high speed but also eager to use that speed to chase and catch game additionally produced a gentle, emotionally expressive, quiet, patient, and resilient breed. Generalizing somewhat, the breed has long been made up of, as the truism goes, “forty mile an hour couch potatoes,” who demanded only limited exercise and bonded mightily with human housemates. This has been the janus-faced nature of the breed—speed machine and sensitive companion. It confused debates over greyhound confinement since many people who believed they understood these dogs perhaps knew or chose to emphasize one element or another of their natures as inborn and normative.

As grassroots volunteer adoption groups appeared all around the US and Canada in the 1990s, soon the balance of ex-racers were being adopted out. By 2002, the industry claimed that up to ninety per cent of the 22,000 dogs then in the track system would end their days as house-pets.37 Many adoption groups were either staffed with volunteers, who were also investors (who owned racing dogs) and pro-racing adopters, or groups that maintained friendly relations with track kennel operators and investors by refraining from publicly supporting or condemning the industry so as to protect their access to dogs. Plenty of investors, kennel operators, and farm operators made it known that they would boycott anti-racing adoption groups, thus those groups tended to link up with neutral adoption groups and humane societies who quietly passed dogs along to anti-racing groups for homing.38

As greyhounds began proliferating around the continent as household companions, adoption organizations and adopters reported that dogs coming out of the tracks exhibited many psychological and physical conditions that outsiders found unacceptable. Many adopters critical of the industry took them as evidence of neglect or abuse. Advice for new owners of retired NGA racers included information about how to recognize and manage dogs who displayed strange behaviours. “At first your new greyhound may stare ahead and seem unresponsive. This is typical greyhound stress behaviour. Remember it is undergoing stress adjusting to its new environment. Quiet and calm is the way to go,” advised one group in Massachusetts.39 Other colloquial advice warned that some dogs might arrive underweight, with teeth that “look dreadful,” perhaps ground down from chewing crate bars due to frustration or boredom. They might also display scars on their skin and coat, or so-called baboon butt baldness on the thighs.40

On Facebook and various pro-industry blogs, former dog trainer Dennis McKeon addressed adopters regarding a greyhound’s transition to household living, arguing that those outside the industry might not know greyhounds as well as they think:

There are many challenges ahead for both the Greyhound and his new adoptive owners. Your Greyhound is about to embark on a voyage to an entirely new and alien universe. He has left behind his littermates and pack members, some of whom he has been with since birth. . . . He has bid fond farewell to his human familiars and caretakers, their voices and their touch, to the regimented, predictable routines and the security of his racing environs, and he is now faced with novelty at every turn. The Greyhound no longer has the outlet of training and racing—“hunting” with the pack, to expend his excess energies, and to express himself in the fashion that forged his very being. . . . Greyhounds thrive on punctuality and routine. They prefer the known to the unknown. Novelty can be their undoing. Novelty is what they face with beginning their lives as house pets.41

For industry insiders like McKeon, adoption was a worry in some ways since greyhound investors gave away their dogs when they stopped racing knowing that not every adoptive owner would understand his or her greyhound’s past experience, and that—as with trainers and kennel operators—some adopters would be lazy or selfish caregivers to their dogs. So, by their interpretation, track captivity was normative, household life potentially lonely and traumatizing.

Ex-racers’ uncertainty in new environments and their ostensible love of routine may be produced in part by breeding dogs who thrive in the quasi-industrial system of production, training, and racing. Equally, it may be a sign of captive animals who have adapted to a stressful or boring situation by focusing on routine as a way to cope, but emerging from the experience always more reticent than dogs with more diverse life experiences.42 Or perhaps it was a combination of the two: breeding and management that made the NGA greyhound novelty-averse, at least when they first left the track or farm? Thinking again of Birke, Hockenhull, and Creighton’s research, indicating that people often create a particular animal and life story for themselves that flatters their self-image, it is no doubt the case that kennel operators limited greyhounds’ experiences, forcing them into carefully timed routines that created the ostensible reticence of racing greyhound as much as catering to it.43 That is, the track kennel context produced the very novelty-averse NGA greyhounds that industry people argued were bred to be crated and confined the majority of the time so they would not be upset by “the unknown.”

Turning now to the question of a greyhound’s life after the track, digital sources can supply a counterpoint or confirmation to the kinds of reporting codified in industry-defences of dog management or proscriptive books of adoption advice by veterinarians and adoption advocates. First, as an example, take the non-profit Detroit group Michigan Retired Greyhounds as Pets (MI ReGAP), one of a number of state-based “ReGAP” groups in the nation. For the twenty years they were active in adoption, the non-profit group employed a system for retraining and finding permanent homes—“forever homes,” as the adoption groups phrase it—for greyhounds and claimed that 1,800 dogs passed through their hands.44 Many of their greyhounds came from Mobile Greyhound Park in Theodore, Alabama, although others made their way to the group from farms and tracks in Florida, West Virginia, and occasionally elsewhere.

For ReGAP greyhounds, exiting track captivity and entering household captivity began with a trip to a local veterinarian for “vetting” as the colloquialism goes, then a van haul north where ReGAP volunteers would meet at a half-way point. Arriving in Detroit thereafter, the first stop was the Dapper Dog Wash, where a crew of volunteers washed the greyhounds and took initial photographs for the ReGAP adoption website.45 ReGAP owned no kennel and philosophically supported housing dogs in a foster home where they would most quickly adjust to non-institutional housing. Not all groups agree about how to house ex-racers. By contrast, the non-profit Greyhound Pets, Inc. adoption group in Woodinville, Washington, for instance, house their greyhounds at a recently-constructed kennel, which relieves the group of finding foster homes but requires owning and running the facility. At the facility, dogs live in indoor runs of approximately fifty square feet.46 An anonymous source said to me of this method, “Yeah, it’s a nice kennel, but it is still a kennel,” meaning that, although leash trained and socialized extensively, the dogs kept there are delayed in learning the life skills necessary for house dog living.47

Once in a foster home, members of a given household observed new ReGAP dogs and reported to volunteers on their progress. It is true that, just off the track, NGA greyhounds still need to learn life skills that most dogs absorb as young puppies, including house training, how to travel up and down staircases, not to attempt to walk through windows or wall mirrors, not to eat off the table or kitchen counters (known as “counter surfing”), for some, how to answer to a name or interact with cats, small dogs or children, and finally, how to respond to the word “no.” Some proved frightened of new things: a woman walking in high heels, the sight of rolling suitcases or kids on skateboards, the sound of holiday fireworks, or a flight of stairs. Most greyhounds learned all these things quickly, proving themselves adaptable within the confines of a household. With their deep rib cages and bony bodies, ex-racers became especially famous for their ability to find a soft spot to lie down, especially beds and couches. Nonetheless, ReGAP recommended crating greyhounds in the house when they could not be immediately supervised, demanding that foster homes promise to honour their “responsibilities,” including: “To use a crate of recommended size whenever the dog is unattended. This includes while at work, etc. The crate must be placed in a main room in the house NOT in an isolated area. The crate must be used throughout the foster period unless specific authority is obtained from the foster coordinator. If you do not have a crate, MI REGAP will provide one free of charge.”48

Meanwhile, many adopters reported abandoning crating as soon as feasible. Some said they opposed “cages” or found them unsightly or inconvenient to have in the house. Others discovered that, for a breed of supposed “denners,” as industry advocates would have it, many greyhounds resisted crating by injuring themselves, defecating or urinating, or vocalizing while inside.49 Here, seemingly ephemeral or trivial digital sources provide detail that conventional textual sources cannot. “Help! New Greyhound Pooped All Over His Crate When We Left Him,” said the subject line on a 2012 post by a new adopter, fluteplayer67, on the discussion site GreyTalk.com. This site and its parallel Facebook page have for about twenty years been a place where those living with greyhounds could discuss their behaviour as they transitioned from institutional living to household living. The post continued:

We are brand new owners of the sweetest two-year-old greyhound. We read several books, etc., but lavished him with attention when he arrived. He stayed in the crate while we went to church last Sunday with no problem. That night I left him in our bedroom alone for about 15 minutes while I was getting my son to bed. He pooped on the bedroom floor while I was away. Then he kept rearing up when I tried to crate him during the week. I am a stay at home mom so I am around a lot. When we crated him to go the grocery store a few days later he had diarrhea all over the crate and himself and had some blood on his paws from trying to get out. He is an angel in all other ways, great with the kids, fine with the cat, just a joy. I am wondering what to do now. . . . He loves his little area with blankets and I would leave him out of the crate there but am afraid something will happen. Thanks for any suggestions, we love our Jett!!!!50

Considering how many adopters reported that in the household context their greyhounds appeared to “hate” being in a dog crate by refusing to go inside on command, or barking, whining, chewing their paws or kennel bars, or shivering while inside, it appears that, once they were given another option, many NGA greyhounds rejected being enclosed in a small space. Indeed, it was an extraordinary irony that a breed designed for speed, that “loves to run” as wisdom goes, should ever be confined much of the day in a crate in order to be seen to live up to his or her potential or protected from injury.

Sixteen readers of the post replied with advice and their own stories of dogs’ resistance to being in confined spaces, especially if crated in secluded areas of the household. “Luna was a disaster with her crate when I first got her, and would chew the bars until her gums bled,” said the site user schultzic. “He may really be telling you he doesn’t want to be ‘locked in’—fine to leave the door open for him to enter at his choosing. . . . My guess is that it’s anxiety driven,” said Trihounds. Of his own dogs, he explained, “Bumper—first dog . . . crated for about a month. . . . No issues. I’ll tell you though, he was a crate chewer at the track and I was told he messed his crate more than normal. Guess he didn’t like it. Squirt—crated 2 days. Waste of time, she hated it, let everyone know it, and never needed it thereafter.” Guest Gillybear agreed, “We tried crating our first grey but she had diarrhea and had actually bent the metal wire with her nose! She was allowed to roam after that.”51

GeorgeofNE had similar experiences, but explained things in ways that demonstrated how in a household adopters believed they have a responsibility to adapt animal management routines to an individual dog (not vice versa, as would have been the case at the track where things were supposed to be more “businesslike.”52) This adopter explained:

Turns out the Greyhound I adopted considered being crated like being sent to his own private hell. He was beyond miserable. I know because I videotaped him after I had neighbor after neighbor (I live in a condo) complain that he was “howling for hours.” I didn’t believe them. When I watched the tape, I cried.

Before my door was even all the way shut, he tipped back his head and howled until the 2 hour tape ran out. Oh sure, in between howls he might have licked his Kong [dog toy filled with peanut butter] for a second or two. But that was all. He never relaxed. . . . George was nearly 5, and had been in a kennel environment his entire life. . . . Why wouldn’t he be OK in the crate? Well, cause in a kennel, there are dogs above you, next to you, across from you. Very, very different than being locked in a wire box all alone in a condo while the person you just met disappears. (emphasis in original)53

Here, people discussed greyhounds as individuals who changed over time and exposed their own belief that, as adopters (or “rescuers,” often) they had a responsibility to ask for advice or use trial and error to create a feasible context for their greyhounds by working within each dog’s limitations. This ethos was a challenge to industry marketing or proscriptive adoptive literature that dominated most textual understandings of these dogs as beings native to the crate and would have explained self-injury or vocalization by crated greyhounds as simply a failure of the dog’s training.

Within the confines of a household, a greyhound’s welfare is arguably better than at a dog track, although pro-industry people would argue against that forcefully. Beyond the group housing and mass management at the track kennel, former racers have freedom to move—to look out a window, to find a new sleeping spot, to travel across the room to drink water and stretch their legs, to interact with people, dogs, cats of the household, or not—and to negotiate with human cohabitants about how they will live. In private households, greyhounds are more able to practice species-typical behaviours of social interaction and explore their surroundings, while enjoying a larger variety of mental stimulation and thus improved welfare.54 The Internet abounds with photographs and artwork depicting ex-racers lolling on couches, dog beds, or human beds in these homes, indicating that many do indeed believe that they “have died and gone to Heaven,” as one advice manual for adopters put it.55

Foster home and adopters’ discussions of specific behaviours suggests that some of these dogs found the transition to a new context difficult, but also a kind of opportunity perhaps. Suddenly offered a choice and a new context, they devised ways of intervening to change household routines. These kinds of digital sources, of which there are many, show that some of these dogs appeared to have forgotten or were uninterested in the older routines or limitations they experienced out of necessity living at a dog track.56

Conclusion

The digital record of greyhound and adopter behaviour is abundant but also fragile. Historians need to take these sources seriously as historical documents before they are gone. The digital record gives us great insight into the communities of people who have supported and opposed dog racing since the 1990s, and it gives us a ring-side seat to the often uncivil arguments that go on between the industry and its critics. At the same time, if we take historical animal experience and behaviour to be historically relevant—either for a record of these dogs and their intrinsic value, or for what it tells us about the experiences of the people around them—we have a way of documenting the efforts of dogs and people to figure out how greyhounds would transition from a life as an institutionally housed investment to a life as a family member. For greyhounds and their adopters, this transition could be a confusing process. Yet, those difficulties help us understand the nature of petkeeping and animal advocacy in the digital age, when communities became capable of finding and supporting one another in ways that might have been impossible in earlier historical periods, before discussion boards, email, and Facebook. These stories of a continental community of adopters constitutes a history of NGA greyhounds in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We should see those dogs’ history in the context of expanding public efforts to redefine pet ownership with the responsibility to tackle and solve new animal welfare and behaviour issues in conversation with dogs, who arrived a little older and carrying the baggage of often-difficult individual pasts and experiences.57

My digital archive on greyhounds, greyhound breeding, and racing, and the advocacy and adoption communities consists of fragile historical sources that can be surprisingly ephemeral; many of these posts and pages will be gone in hours, days, weeks, months or (certainly) years. These sources need to be captured—the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine will not suffice since it can only reproduce webpages if users already possess a historical webpage URL or unique keywords to sift out relevant pages from the billions stored.58 The blunt nature of the Wayback Machine repository compounds the problem that, as is a truism in our field, archives are designed to save a record of human agency, capturing records of animals only by accident. So, historians of animals interested in the recent past are obligated to build their own archives and to take these sources seriously as archival material. The question that remains is how such self-made archives might be more formally preserved beyond the computer of any individual researcher.

Notes

1 Raymond Madden, “Imagining the Greyhound: ‘Racing’ and ‘rescue’ narratives in a human dog relationship,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 24, no. 4 (August 2010): 504–05.

2 Eben Kirksey, “Multispecies Families,” in Emergent Ecologies, ed. Eben Kirksey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 134–35.

3 Harriet Ritvo, “Combinations and Conjunction,” in Traces of the Animal Past, ed. Sean Kheraj and Jennifer Bonnell (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2022).

4 Lynda Birke, “Who—or What—are the Rats (and Mice) in the Laboratory,” Society and Animals 11, no. 3 (2003): 216–18.

5 Sandra Swart, “Kicking Over the Traces? Freeing the Animal from the Archive,” and Lindsay Stallones Marshall, “Hearing History through Hoofbeats: Exploring Equine Volition and Voice in the Archive,” in Traces of the Animal Past, ed. Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2022).

6 Birke, “Who—or What,” 217. In this research, I rely upon animal welfare science research on domestic dogs to get some sense of why greyhounds behave as they do in various settings.

7 Ian Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Research (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2019), 9, 15.

8 Sean Kheraj, “Spacial Analysis and Digital Urban Animal History,” in Traces of the Animal Past, ed. Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2022).

9 Facebook can be a controversial digital source for some researchers. Ian Milligan argues that the entire platform is off limits due to ethical concerns. Milligan, History in the Age of Abundance?, 16. In consulting with the Office of Research Ethics experts at my own university, I was advised that any public Facebook page open to search engines can be quoted and cited freely (say, pages run by adoption groups or industry organizations that routinely seek public attention and speak to journalists about their activities). However, any Facebook content that was accessed by becoming Facebook “friends” with the author or through the permission of a closed-group administrator can be cited or quoted only with the written permission of all authors concerned. Gaining permission to reproduce images found on those sites is even more complex, requiring permission of the original poster of the image as well as the social media platform company. With respect to publicly available but older websites, discussion boards, and social media posts effectively hidden by being buried in pages of search results or otherwise difficult to navigate to in chronologically displayed posts, Milligan argues that original authors have an expectation of privacy. Similarly, deleted online sources archived in a digital repository should be excluded or anonymized to protect the privacy of its original authors. This is problematic dilemma for professional historians who employ extensive notes and bibliographies of sources so that others may visit primary sources to examine them themselves. In this study, I cite digital sources in which the authors had no expectation of privacy either because they intentionally posted on public Facebook pages (viewable without a Facebook account) or other public websites specifically designed to reach a public audience, or they employed usernames that obscured their true names.

10 Trevor Owens and Thomas Padilla, “Digital Sources and Digital Archives: Historical Evidence in the Digital Age,” International Journal of Digital Humanities (2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-020-00028-7.

11 Owens and Padilla, “Digital Sources and Digital Archives.”

12 Glenn D. Tiffert, “Peering Down the Memory Hole: Censorship, Digitization, and the Fragility of Our Knowledge Base,” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (April 2019): 550–52.

13 Jason Colby, “Tuffy’s Cold War: Science, Dolphins, and the US Navy,” in Traces of the Animal Past, ed. Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2022).

14 Cynthia A. Branigan, The Reign of the Greyhound, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Howell Book House, 2004), 152–72; C. G. E. Wilmshurst, The Book of the Greyhound (London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1961).

15 Ryan H. Reed, Born to Run: The Racing Greyhound From Competitor to Companion (Lexington, KY: Bowtie Press, 2010), 94.

16 Laura Thompson, The Dogs: A Personal History of Greyhound Racing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 50–72.

17 Branigan, Reign of the Greyhound, 199–200; Robert Temple, The History of Greyhound Racing in New England (n.p.: Robert Temple, 2011), 12–13; Gwyneth Anne Thayer, Going to the Dogs. Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 6–7, 95–129.

18 Thayer, Going to the Dogs, 130.

19 Thayer, Going to the Dogs, 134–48.

20 Addie Patricia Asay, “Greyhounds: Racing to their Deaths,” Stetson Law Review 32, no. 2 (2003): 449; Branigan, Reign of the Greyhound, 201.

21 Brenda Hume, comment, November 10, 2012, to The Quick and the Dead, Transcript. Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Company, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/2012-11-11/4355398#transcript.

22 Justine Groizard, “Greyhounds and Racing Industry Participants: A Look at the New South Wales Greyhound Racing Community,” Animal Studies Journal 8, no. 1 (2019): 138–42.

23 David M. Halbfinger, “Dismal End for Race Dogs, Alabama Authorities Say,” New York Times, May 23, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/23/us/dismal-end-for-race-dogs-alabama-authorities-say.html; David Harkin, “Speaker: Dr. David Harkin, DMV,” Heart of America Greyhound Gathering 2017, Abilene, Kansas, June 24, 2017; Thayer, Going to the Dogs, 150.

24 The term “wastage” is one commonly used in the regulation of dog racing in Australia and indicates all the dogs who are killed before old age. Some are culled as puppies when early training shows them to be lacklustre performers, others after injury sustained during a race, and other still due to some other calculation by an owner that they are no longer financially viable. Alexandra McEwan and Krishna Skandakmar, “The Welfare of Greyhounds in Australian Racing: Has the Industry Run Its Course?,” Australian Animal Protection Law Journal 6 (December 2011): 64; Anna L. Palmer et al., “Patterns of Racing and Career Duration of Racing Greyhounds in New Zealand,” Animals 10, no. 796 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10050796.

25 Asay, “Greyhounds”; Grey2K USA Worldwide, Fact Sheet: Greyhound Injury Reporting 2011, www.grey2kusa.org/pdf/Fact_Sheet_on_Greyhound_Injury_Reporting.pdf; Darren Morris, Training the Racing the Greyhound (Ramsbury, UK: Crowwood Press, 2009), 77–116. On early adoption programs, see, for instance, Dennis McKeon, “The Roots of Anti-Racing Activism,” All About Greyhounds, https://www.greyhoundinfo.org/?page_id=885.

26 One recent estimate is that 5,000 adoptions per year cost up to $1.25 million to the industry, which is drawn out of purse money. Or, put another way, others estimate that to transport and provide initial medical care for one retired racer amounts to $600 per dog, with housing and feed costs beyond that. In the 1980s and 1990s, many breeders and kennel operators would have gone out of business had they been required to shoulder a portion of those costs. Many in the industry also found it outrageous that they should thus be held morally or financially accountable to critics who would never visit a dog track in any event. Moira Corrigan, “Letter from the President,” The Bark. Official Newsletter of Greyhound Pets, Inc., no. 1 (Spring 2014): 1; Dennis McKeon, “Below is a Response to a Very Well-Thought Out Anti-Racing Post,” Dennis McKeon’s Facebook Page, April 7, http://www.facebook.com/dennis.mckeon.33/posts/10152166763176829; Thayer, Going to the Dogs, 14.

27 Thayer, Going to the Dogs, 101; Branigan, Reign of the Greyhound, 209.

28 Lynda Birke, Joanna Hockenhull, and Emma Creighton, “The Horse’s Tale: Narratives of Caring for/about Horses,” Society and Animals 18, no. 4 (2010): 331–47.

29 Madden, “Imagining the Greyhound,” 510; Thayer, Going to the Dogs, 16.

30 Morris, Training the Racing the Greyhound, 38–45; Dennis McKeon, “For the New Adopter—A Simple Primer to Help You Understand Your New Greyhound,” All About Greyhounds, May 4, 2011, http://www.greyhoundinfo.org/?page_id=1078.

31 See, for example, Roy Brindley, Life’s a Gamble (London Transworld/Penguin, 2009), 113–19.

32 Gulf Greyhound Park, “The Greyhound - From Racing to Your Home,” YouTube video, accessed December 1, 2017, http://youtu.be/Pwn9lLg5IeI.

33 Grey2K USA Worldwide, Fact Sheet: Greyhound Racing in the United States, 2014, http://www.grey2kusa.org/pdf/GREY2KUSANationalFactSheet.pdf; Penny Wick, “Crating for Safety and Wellbeing,” http://www.ngagreyhounds.com/Debunking-Lies?h155=33, accessed December 1, 2017. See also, Frankstach, “Feeding Racing Greyhounds,” YouTube video, November 16, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weUl_QeEgWw; Tucsongreyhound85713, “Tucson Greyhound Park, Mary Gray Kennel,” YouTube video, January 27, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPkjLtyTfo4.

34 Grey2KUSA Worldwide, “Confinement in Greyhound Racing,” https://www.grey2kusa.org/about/confinement.php, accessed December 12, 2017.

35 This text appeared on Dennis McKeon’s Facebook page, where I first encountered it, but also on various blogs and websites, and I cite the public sources of his writing. Dennis McKeon, “Couch Potato, Meet Crate Potato,” Awesome Paws & Camp Greyhound blog, September 22, 2013, http://awesomepaws.proboards.com/thread/100/couch-potato-crate-dennis-mckeon#ixzz3Kzryh7hB.

36 Wilmshurst, Book of the Greyhound, 2.

37 Mark Derr, A Dog’s History of America (New York: North Point Press, 2004), 334.

38 These observations come from hundreds of hours of reading discussions and arguments among greyhound adopters and adoption group volunteers on Facebook groups pages, many of them closed pages requiring an administrator to grant admission. I have yet to determine a feasible way to cite that kind of research such that readers could visit the sources to vet them and my analysis themselves.

39 The Greyhound Project, Inc., “The First Few Days in a New Home,” http://www.adopt-a-greyhound.org/advice/the_first_few_days_in_a_new_home.shtml, accessed December 12, 2017.

40 Livingood, Retired Racing Greyhounds, 163. The phenomenon of thigh baldness was “just another one of the many things no one agrees upon,” explained Lee Livingood. Some falsely believed it to be related to improper thyroid function, which some believed was common to the breed in any setting. Others chalked it up to kennel conditions like flea and tick infestations, or intensive confinement in which a greyhound’s delicate fur was easily lost to stress or abrasion against crate or dog hauler compartment walls. Grassmere Animal Hospital, “Bald Thighs, Comedones, Happy Tail,” accessed May 15, 2010, http://www.grassmere-animal-hospital.com; Carolyn Raeke, The Best Finish: Adopting a Retired Racing Greyhound (Neptune City, NJ: T. F. H. Publishers, 2004), 66; “Greyhound Glossary: Baboon Butt (Bald Butt),” Houndlife Blog, accessed March 2, 2008, http://houndlife.blogspot.ca/2008/03/greyhound-glossary.html.

41 McKeon, “For the New Adopter.”

42 Sue Savage-Rumbaugh et al., “Welfare of Apes in Captive Environments: Comments On, and By, a Specific Group of Apes,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 10, no. 1 (2007): 16.

43 Birke, Hockenhull, and Creighton, “Horse’s Tale.”

44 Michigan Retired Greyhounds as Pets, accessed January 7, 2014, http://rescuedgreyhounds.org/.

45 Michigan Retired Greyhounds as Pets, accessed January 7, 2014, http://rescuedgreyhounds.org/.

46 Greyhound Pets, Inc., accessed January 14, 2017, https://www.greyhoundpetsinc.org/.

47 Anonymous kennel volunteer, Greyhound Pets, Inc., Woodinville, Washington, personal interview, 15 December 2012.

48 Michigan ReGAP, “Your New Greyhound,” adoption packet pamphlet, n.d.; Michigan ReGap, “Foster Home Agreement,” 2009.

49 As with the digital sources discussed in note 38 of this chapter, this information is aggregated from many dozens of Facebook posts over a decade. How are historians to cite that?

50 Guest Gillybear, schultzic, Trihounds comments in “Help! New Greyhound Pooped All Over His Crate When We Left Him,” July 11, 2012, www.greytalk.com, https://forum.greytalk.com/topic/288191-help-new-greyhound-pooped-all-over-his-crate-when-we-left-him/.

51 fluteplayer67 comment in “Help! New Greyhound Pooped All Over His Crate When We Left Him,” July 11, 2012, www.greytalk.com, https://forum.greytalk.com/topic/288191-help-new-greyhound-pooped-all-over-his-crate-when-we-left-him/.

52 Gulf Greyhound Park, “The Greyhound - From Racing to Your Home,” YouTube video, accessed December 1, 2017, http://youtu.be/Pwn9lLg5IeI.

53 GeorgeofNE comment in “Help! New Greyhound Pooped All Over His Crate When We Left Him,” July 11, 2012, www.greytalk.com, https://forum.greytalk.com/topic/288191-help-new-greyhound-pooped-all-over-his-crate-when-we-left-him/.

54 Nicola Rooney and Kevin Stafford, “Dogs (Canis familiaris),” in Companion Animal Care and Welfare: The UFAW Companion Animal Handbook, ed. James Yeates (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2019), 85–89.

55 Greyhound Pets, Inc., The Greyhound Adopter’s Guide (Woodinville, WA: Greyhound Pets, Inc., 2008), 1.

56 Greyhound Pets, Inc., Greyhound Adopter’s Guide, 1.

57 On advocacy and grassroots organizing since the advent of email, see Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2009), 143–60.

58 The Wayback Machine is the rudimentary but growing archive of the Internet at the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/web/.