If the practices exposed on Four Corners Monday night are as widespread as depicted, and the governing bodies as ignorant of them as depicted, the "sport" has no right existing. It cannot be reliably regulated.
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It's not often you watch television and find yourself simultaneously stunned, furious and heartbroken, but the gut-wrenching documentation of "live baiting" in dog racing did just that to thousands of Australians this week.
Secretly filmed video of a rabbit still bucking and gasping for air as its spine and intestines lay exposed after being torn apart by a dog.
A live possum snapped in half, attached to a lure by only its spinal cord. Another possum fighting ferociously as its baby is pulled from its arms and a leading dog trainer encourages a worker to "bash its head" in before the tiny animal is suffocated in sand.
Wide-eyed piglets mauled and eviscerated as they scream for their lives.
In at least one instance, a child, brought to the "breaking-in track", watches on as animals are savaged and killed.
All of this precipitated, encouraged and paid for by many of the industry's biggest names - top-flight trainers and owners, a former steward (the "policemen of the sport") - who not only pay to have their dogs maul and kill defenceless animals but do it to defraud the punters who supply their livelihoods.
They are grubs and cheats. It goes without saying the trainers and handlers shown on video mutilating live animals should be jailed. Animal cruelty laws exist for this purpose.
However, if a significant number of participants in a sport are prepared to break those laws - to torture and kill animals for gain and amusement - and the people charged with policing them are so clueless or so gutless as to say they had no idea, the sport should be banned. It's feral.
Anybody with a passing familiarity of greyhound racing knows live baiting is an open secret. Attend a meeting and you'll hear punters, trainers and bookies say a dog is a good chance of winning because "it's had a kill".
What Four Corners, Animal Liberation Queensland and Animals Australia have done is remove any possibility of denial. It's all there on camera.
For the sport's regulators to claim ignorance is frightening. As Four Corners' Caro Meldrum-Hanna said in her report: "It's only an hour's drive from the CBDs of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney to each of the tracks where live baiting is frequently occurring.
"And a small group of investigators, working on a shoestring, managed to quickly discover what the regulators, with their deep pockets, have deemed too hard to find for themselves."
Granted, these regulators might have their hands full keeping track of the abuses and killings of dogs in their sport when it actually plays by its rules.
Granted, acts as despicable and cruel happen every day of the week to bring you your bacon, eggs, steak and milk.
Granted, there are far more terrible things happening to human beings on the planet right this minute, but this should still not prevent our compassion for animals.
Greyhound racing has no practical reason for being. It's as much a "sport" as fox hunting or bull fighting. It's very origins are founded on cruelty; two blokes in a paddock sicking their dog onto a rabbit to see who can kill it first
Greyhound racing has no practical reason for being. It's as much a "sport" as fox hunting or bull fighting. It's very origins are founded on cruelty; two blokes in a paddock sicking their dog onto a rabbit to see who can kill it first.
The sport will tell you it's moved on from this but it appears many of its top echelon has not.
Back in 2007, Michael Vick, the former NFL quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons was one of the biggest sports stars in the US when he was convicted - on far less evidence than presented by Four Corners - of funding a dog-fighting ring and drowning and hanging animals that had not performed well. He served 21 months in prison.
His jailing reverberated through the US, as should the jailing of the people involved in the greyhound industry's barbarism, who think so little of the welfare of the creatures we share the earth with, they'd bring a child to watch their torture and death.
As Meldrum-Hanna said: "If racing on the television and at the track involved either a dead or a live animal strapped to the lure, do you think Australians would be supporting that?"
Of course not.
Perhaps the most perverse part of this story - aside from gambling companies now taking the high moral ground on the sport - is greyhounds are widely considered one of the gentlest dog breeds and it's only the savagery of humans that brutalises them into the behaviour seen on tape.
To call this "inhumane" is a joke of semantics; only humans devise and execute these sort of monstrosities.
