Life with Greyhounds

The Greyhound Gang

Claudia Presto was having a mid-life crisis. It was the early 1990s, and she was working for one of the big new online corporations, Prodigy, that pre-dated the Internet as we know it today. But she needed something more.

She had also fallen in love with Greyhounds. It had started a few years earlier, when she adopted a dog that was being "retired" from her local race track. His name was Eliminator. "They're such beautiful dogs," she says. "So elegant." And, she discovered, their plight is often so sad.

Each year, more than 35,000 are bred for racing. And when their racing days are over, all too often the dogs are simply killed - about 20,000 each year, and simply because they can no longer make money for their owners. Others are "donated" to research facilities and veterinary schools (for a tax write-off), and yet more are bred specifically for experimentation.

Learning all this drew Claudia even closer to her special dog - and to the start of a new life for herself. She knew she had to do something...

For a while, she supported her local Greyhound rescue groups. But her growing dream was to have a rescue of her own. So she quit her job, packed up her belongings, and set off across the country. A few months later, traveling through the red rock country of Southern Utah, she came upon Best Friends. She worked at the sanctuary for a few months, then found the two and a half acres that would become the home of the Greyhound Gang, a rescue, foster, and adoption organization that worked to place Greyhounds from race tracks in new homes.

Claudia's beat was primarily the racetracks of the Southwest, but rescue groups like hers are springing up all over the nation. Now numbering over 300, they've generated a lot of publicity and support for this graceful breed.

Greyhounds are now finding a new role in life, not as athletes but as pets. And gradually, thanks to rescue groups like Claudia's, this doe-eyed breed is making a new place for itself.

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