GOING TO THE DOGS

Otago Witness, Issue 3833, 30 August 1927, Page 77

GOING TO THE DOGS

The grass of the race track glows a bright emerald under its brilliant arch of lamps—a luminous ribbon encircling an oval of dark turf where there is only the dimness of a June twilight, and no stir. The far side of the stadium is indistinct and empty—empty not because London has been slow in welcoming its first electric hare on the White City track, but only because to-night the races are not to be open to the public —and as one watches the dogs, lean, rippling, delicious creatures in their red ami yellow and blue jackets, being walked to the starting box by their trainers, it is easy to understand wherein the fascination of' this new sport lies It is a clean sport, of course, a sport without murder, and that counts for much; it also provides about as exciting and (relatively) harmless a medium for getting rid of one’s money as can be imagined, whilst treated simply as an entertainment it is as cheap as the cinema and much more healthy; but there is something in it beyond all this, less easily defined, of which every onlooker must surely be aware—particularly when the races are run in the twilight, as they frequently must be, or at night. The whole thing is so astonishingly fantastic. This cannot, I think, be entirely due to the element of novelty in the sport. A single greyhound going at full speed —

that is, something well over 30 miles per hour (the hare may go up to 50) —is a very graceful sight, but six greyhounds going all out after a flying cloud of blue asteroids—for that is all one sees of the hare when it is on the far side of the track—is more than a graceful sight; it is a thoroughly exhilarating one. If you have five shillings on Silver Arrow, or whatever the name of your particular fancy may be, it is a sight to hold the attention as few spectacles can, whether in sport or in anything else. The greyhounds themselves are in a yelping of excitement from the time the first hum of their quarry’s machinery is audible till the lid of their subdivided mousetrap flies up to release them. The hare, which has been backed out of its hole and sent for a preliminary run round the track, is rocking along on its rail like the Flying Scotsman by the time it flashes abreast of the starting box, but it has hardly reached the control tower 20 or so yards further on before six frantic, leaping forms, each a streak of bright colour with its distinguishing coat, are on its heels. If there are hurdles to be negotiated—and a greyhound takes a hurdle as a swallow skims over a housetop—the hare, being a thoroughly underhand creature in every way, flicks through a gate, which is closed immediately after its passage, and so gets home, as usual, length on length ahead of its pursuers. Once or twice, in the earlier races at Manchester, the hare was caught; on one occasion the leading dog overtook it, snapped at it, and was hurt, as well as

baffled at the animal’s indifference; in another race a dog had its leg broken by the bar on which the hare runs. These mishaps, however, were due to faulty machinery, and, with a skilled electrical engineer in the control tower regulating the hare’s pace, are not likely to occur again. Except for quite unforeseen accidents, the only other way in which a race may be ruined is in the event of the dogs ceasing to take an interest in their quarry for some reason and —for, muzzled though they are, even so their teeth are not entirely useless—starting to savage each other instead; but since the temper of a dog, if it is a well-bred dog, depends very largely on its trainer, savaging should not be much seen on efficiently run tracks. And, anyhow—unless they enjoy the racing for its own sake, in which ease an express tramcar should do just as well as a stuffed hare skin—greyhounds are surely proven idiots. For three years in America the best Irishbred dogs have been chasing round 500 yards of turf after a complete illusion, and there seems no reason to suppose that British dogs, whether in Edinburgh, Leeds, or London, will over discover that they are wasting their time. The construction of a greyhound racing track is obviously a long and complicated business, but probably only a small minority of the thousands who watched London’s first races at the beginning of this week realised how much time and patience had been spent beforehand in grading the dogs—that is, grouping them according to speed, so that the race would be a race. It is plainly futile to match a dog which takes 32sec to do the 500yds with another whose average time is 29sec, but you cannot tell simly by looking at a dog whether it is going to be a champion or not, and even if you pay £l5O for it, you cannot be sure that it will complete the course in less time than the £lO, 33sec dogs take; the animal may develop a cold at the last moment and thus become worse than useless as a starter. The electric hare (which, it should perhaps be explained, is simply an object moving along an electric rail, and is in no way animated itself) has set up a new T standard of speed—of sheer speed, untrammelled, without consideration of nimbleness or quick-turning abilities—

in greyhounds, so that a champion coursing dog would in all probability be a failure on the race track; but the chief points for breeding are still, I believe, very much as they always were. I shall not attempt to catalogue the points of a well-bred greyhound because I have never bred the beasts, and make my selections, when 1 go to the dogs, according to names, colours, and general appearance of slinkiness; but I notice that even the experts on form are not always entirely agreed on all issues. There was, for instance, the recent discussion about feet, which was opened by a writer who stated, innocently enough, that a greyhound’s feet should be like a cat’s. Immediately this was challenged by another writer, who preferred, he said, that all the best greyhounds should have feet like terrier’s, and it was not until a third writer gently interpolated the news that since terriers’ feet should be like cats’ feet it all came to much the same thing that the second over-scrupulous expert was silenced. However, nobody can be expected to know all about a sport which is as yet only in its infancy. Let me admit that on the only occasion so far on which I selected a dog because of its apparently intelligent eyes, rat-like tail, snake-like neck, straight forelegs, and deep chest (all good racing points), the animal had not even the ordinary wit to keep on the inside of the track, and finished a good second behind its fellows. On the other hand, when I chose a dog for its slinky look and rose-coloured coat, it finished with the best time of the evening.

It is not possible, to say whether London will take to this new sport with

the wholeheartedness that the bookmakers would like to see, or even with the enthusiasm accorded to it by the jugged hare enthusiasts of the Midlands. The sport was first tried out in Manchester because, as one of the promoters of the Greyhound Racing Association somewhat inadequately put it, “Manchester was fond of dogs.” I think it would be quite logical to say that it has succeeded in Manchester because Manchester is inordinately fond of gambling. London is more amused than anything else so far—has it not already nicknamed the queer, impossible creature, with its-cocked-up legs and humorous face, the “jugged hare?”—and if any of the 200 odd bookmakers who were present at the White City on Monday night took more than £2O he was certainly lucky. Again, who on earth but the dogged people of the Midlands would sit out on a streaming wet night, with none of the rose and gold glimmer of a fine summer twilight to make a fantastic picture of the track, simply to watch an electrical absurdity making fools of a bedraggled pack of hounds? I suppose that, as a matter of fact, the racing will be abandoned on wet nights, but it is as well to visualise the worst as well as the best. One can only reiterate, finally, that it is a clean sport, a great gamble, and a cheap and entirely fascinating entertainment under ideal weather conditions.— Hamish Maclaren, in the Spectator.