Australian Greens Senator for NSW and Spokesperson for Animal Welfare, Dr Mehreen Faruqi, has called the reopening of the Lismore racing track a farce. Greyhound Racing NSW closed the Lismore track ‘indefinitely’ on 17 January “as a result of unacceptably high levels of major greyhound injuries and fatalities over the past 12 months. But just one day later, the eighteenth of January, an ‘expert panel’ of three (including two representatives of the greyhound racing industry) declared that the catastrophic injuries and deaths experienced at the track in 2019 were the result of non-track related causes”. Three dogs have been killed racing in Lismore this year already.
Senator Faruqi said:
“The Greyhound Racing industry has again proven how unwilling they are to clean up their act and stop the continued deaths and catastrophic injuries suffered during greyhound racing.
“To have three dogs die on track in a matter of weeks from gruesome fractures and then pretend that it has nothing to do with the track shows that they are living in a parallel universe.
“The reality is that racing dogs always has an inherent risk. If they are not even willing to close their most dangerous tracks, I think it really shows how uninterested they are in reforming the industry.
“The Liberal, National and Labor parties shamefully continue to support the killing and maiming of greyhounds with tens of millions of dollars in public money, while schools, hospitals and community facilities are crying out for funding.
“Just recently we have heard about a vet putting down a healthy greyhound in the back of a trainer’s car while kids were present and not even this is enough for the industry to handout a lifetime ban.
“This isn’t an industry interested in reforming, it is an industry emboldened to continue business as usual.
“We need to cut off the public funding for this so-called sport and ban it once and for all. It more than two years since the racing ban backflip and dogs continue to die on and off the track” she concluded.
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