Terrible News

In what can only be described as terrible, sad and horrific news, it looks like two greyhounds attacked a small dog in my home town. The small dog died from a heart attack later that day.

Having owned a small dog that was attacked by a bigger dog, I can only imagine how utterly devastated the dog owners must be.

The news must also come as a blow to Greyhounds as Pets who re-home ex racing greyhounds in New Zealand. They have worked tirelessly for years to generate positive public awareness on the plight of Greyhounds. Having just started to gain some serious traction with the public, an event like this can undo so much hard work.

It also seems like such a complete contrast with what I've come to know of Greyhounds. Lottie, AKA the brindle rocket is so laid back that she'd fall over if you patted her the wrong way. She tends to spend most of her free time on the sofa and when she is out and about she's too busy charging about at Mach 4 to even consider another dog (unless its trying to chase after her). getting her to fetch a ball - forget it, small round things are boring when there's some serious running to do.

What Went Wrong? 

There were two Greyhounds being walked and both wore muzzles. Sadly both Greyhounds appear to have been off the leash and running free. This isn't a bad thing normally, but they were being exercised in a Golf course. Being able to run at between 45 and 60Mph, should either Greyhound decide to bolt, there would have been little the owners could do about it.

Even two Greyhounds can develop a pack mentality and after years of being trained to chase small furry objects around a track, it wasn't terribly surprising that they went after a small fluffy puppy. One Greyhound managed to get its muzzle off (Greyhounds can be particularly ingenious at this as we've seen with Lottie's hilarious attempts to get her muzzle off).

According to the story the small dog had also previously been attacked whilst out walking at the same golf course, and this makes me wonder why its owners decided to walk it in the same place knowing full well that this could potentially happen again (when we owned a Dachshund, we made a conscious effort to walk it where were knew there was no potential trouble for it to get into with other larger dogs after it was attacked).

Based on the information in the story, there appears to be several compounding factors that contributed to today's sad events. These are:

1) The greyhound owners should never have let their dogs off the leash in such a large area where they were not able to keep the dogs in sight

2) Having already had their small dog attacked at the golf course, the owners should have chosen another venue to exercise their dog.

There are a lot of good dog exercise venues in my home town which has at least one dog park. Sadly what is clearly needed is separate dog parks - One for big dogs and one for smaller dogs.

The Moral of the Story

Unfortunately dogs will be dogs and there is always a possibility that this sort of thing will happen. Owner awareness is perhaps the best method of avoiding future attacks. So the moral of the story is probably best described as dont target the dogs, educate their owners.