Cocaine, herbal ecstasy and even Viagra are being given to greyhounds to make them quicker, writes Ronan McGreevy
It was a bad night at the track for Lisburn-based greyhound owner Stephen Ryan. Shes [ sic] A Promise was a bitch, who had a couple of wins and several places in her prior races, which was reflected in her 4/6 starting price and her advantageous trap three placing at Lifford on February 24th this year.
She was the one dog who had shown a bit of form as they lined up for the eighth race of the evening. The other five dogs in the race were all priced at either 5/1 or 6/1. One track observer said "thousands of euro" were placed on her that night, but to no avail. "She was fair, just middle class," he recalled, but on paper, the best in a mediocre field.
Shes a Promise finished fourth. She would have been nothing other than another undistinguished dog in another undistinguished race had she not been the first greyhound to test positive for cocaine in this country.
Two owners, Ryan and Belfast-based David Wilson, were fined €2,000 and €1,000 respectively and given a "severe caution" when tests carried out by Bord na gCon's National Greyhound Laboratory showed three of their dogs tested positive for a metabolite of cocaine. The fines imposed by the independent control committee, which was set up in June, may be the least of their worries. The PSNI has now requested the files from Bord na gCon and the two men could face a criminal investigation.
Doping of greyhounds is nothing new, but the use of a Class A substance gives a sinister twist to a time-honoured practice.
The mood among greyhound owners is one of both anger and bewilderment at a time when the industry looks like it is getting its act together, especially after the tumult which surrounded last year's sacking of Bord na gCon's chief executive Aidan Tynan by the board's then chairman Pascal Taggart over the making public of dope tests. The controversy resulted in the Government-commissioned Dalton Report, which recommended the establishment of an independent control committee with the power to impose fines and, as importantly, to "name and shame" transgressors. Following its first meeting in July, 14 owners were fined. Along with cocaine, traces of amphetamine, benzylpiperazine (BZP, also known as herbal ecstasy), caffeine, other stimulants and painkillers were found.
Bord na gCon is hoping the fines and the outing of transgressors will be enough to deter others from such wilful cheating, but other owners feel the penalties do not go far enough.
"I believe the fines are derisory," says Des Cowan, the chairman of the Irish Greyhound Owners and Breeders Federation (IGOBF). "It amounts to just a slap on the wrist for using a Class A substance. What kind of signal does that send out? They should have got a 12-month minimum ban." The IGOBF says it will raise the issue of the penalties involved in its quarterly meeting with Bord na gCon next month.
Cowan says the use of cocaine did not come as a surprise to him - he had heard anecdotally for the last two years that the drug was being used to dope dogs. It is a relatively easy substance to get a hold of and can be administered just before a race by being rubbed on the dog's gum or sprayed into its nostrils immediately before a race. "It heightens the senses, as does caffeine. If a dog is sitting there with cocaine or caffeine tablets in its gut, it has a heightened sense of hearing, it has a heightened sense of when the hare is coming. It basically heightens your performance for a very short period of time - that's why it is used," says Finbarr Heslin, a vet who who runs the Beaufield Veterinary Centre in Celbridge, Co Kildare, and who has carried out extensive research into the welfare of greyhounds in Ireland.
"Anything that will give a dog the extra edge to get out of the trap and the first bend first is hugely important for a disreputable owner," he adds. "Minute fractions of seconds can make a difference. If these dog owners were told that pineapples would knock a second off their dog's time, they would use pineapples. The problem is that it is tried in a very haphazard way. It's used based on hearsay and the welfare of the dog is never considered."
DOPING GREYHOUNDS WITH cocaine is not new. An Irish trainer was banned from racing his dogs in Britain four years ago when one of them tested positive for cocaine. Cocaine has also been found in other cases in the UK, Florida, which is the centre of the US greyhound industry, and Australia. "We've been looking for it for quite a while given that it had been found in other jurisdictions," says Dr Jim Healy, the head of the National Greyhound Laboratory. "When something is available and being used in society in general, we would use that as an indicator to see if somebody was going to use it in a greyhound."
When it was announced that Viagra was being used as a stimulant for greyhounds, it was banned by Bord na gCon last year. Heslin, a persistent critic of Bord na gCon's doping controls in the past, says it is disingenuous to suggest that, because 99 per cent of greyhounds do not test positive for a banned substance, they are all clean.
"It simply means 99 per cent of greyhounds have tested negative for the substances they have been tested for. There needs to be more transparency about what tests are carried out for what substances."