Hands off our greyhounds!

The Welsh government announced earlier this month that it intends to ban greyhound racing ‘as soon as practicably possible’. This follows cross-party calls for a ban, a government consultation and a petition that attracted around 35,000 signatures. Given that there is only one greyhound track left in the whole of Wales, you could be forgiven for wondering why a ban is considered to be so urgent. It shows that dubious arguments about ‘animal rights’ have taken a worrying hold on the political class.

Ostensibly, the ban is about protecting animal welfare. But the Greyhound Board of Great Britain (GBGB), which regulates the sport, is right to challenge this line. It says the proposals have ‘nothing to do with greyhound welfare and everything to do with pressure from the extreme animal-rights movement’. Notably, the Welsh government did not bother to meet with the racing industry before announcing its plan. The government’s own consultation, GBGB says, ‘highlighted the lack of evidence to support the case for a ban’. Yet this clearly hasn’t dampened the elite’s enthusiasm for bringing an end to the sport.

UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy insists the Westminster government has ‘absolutely no plans’ to follow the Welsh decision – and that she appreciates the ‘joy’ greyhound racing brings and the ‘economic contribution’ it makes. But for how long can we expect this position to hold?

After all, the anti-greyhound lobby will undoubtedly be buoyed by its success in Wales and will now concentrate on other parts of the UK. The Welsh campaign was led by Cut the Chase, a coalition that includes many UK-wide organisations, including Blue Cross, Dogs Trust, Hope Rescue and the RSPCA. They are not likely to stop after the closure of a single Welsh greyhound track.

Nor will animal-rights activists be prepared to compromise. According to Cut the Chase, ‘greyhound racing is inherently dangerous for the dogs involved’ (my emphasis). It claims that ‘running at speed around oval tracks causes significant injury to many dogs’ and that ‘in some cases, the injuries are so severe that it is necessary to euthanise the dog’.

While it is true that some dogs are injured, and if severe this can lead to the dog being euthanised, such injuries have reduced significantly over the years. This is thanks to major advancements in animal welfare, including improved track layouts and having vets on hand at each track. Retired dogs are now routinely rehoused in loving homes as pets. It is untrue and unfair to portray the greyhound industry or those who go to the races as heartless haters of animals. Yet the animal-rights activists influencing the powers-that-be will not accept anything less than the total abolition of greyhound racing.

Nor will they stop there, either. Many of the same campaigners would like to bring an end to horse racing and recreational fishing. As recent proposals put forward in Scotland by the government-run Scottish Animal Welfare Commission show, some animal-rights activists want to ban us from owning pets.

Few would argue against improving animal welfare. Why be needlessly cruel, after all? But we do need to be clear that animals do not and should not have ‘rights’. Rights are a matter for humans. Animals are not autonomous in any moral sense. They do not form part of any moral community.

Talk of animal rights rests on both an exaggeration of the capacities of animals and, more fundamentally, a diminished view of human beings. The oft-repeated claim that animals feel pain in a directly comparable way to humans, for instance, is deeply misguided. As Stuart Derbyshire, a leading expert on pain, argues, this ‘is an interpretation based on our own experience that we project on to the animal world’. It is a form of anthropomorphism, in other words.

It is especially troubling to see ‘animal rights’ arguments making waves on the left. As Neil Davenport has written previously on spiked, the Labour Party was ‘once firmly associated with workers’ rights’, but is now ‘at the forefront of promoting “animal rights”’. Labour’s Animal Welfare Manifesto calls for animal testing ‘to be phased out entirely’, despite the obvious costs to medical research and the otherwise avoidable human suffering this would cause.

This represents a remarkable change. Animal issues were once viewed by socialists as a decadent distraction from questions of human welfare. Left-wing activism was once devoted to tackling things like unemployment, poverty, racism and women’s oppression. Yet today the Welsh Labour government considers it an urgent priority to eradicate the last vestiges of a largely working-class sport, thanks entirely to this muddled, anti-humanist thinking around animals.

If you live in Wales near the Valley Stadium, I would urge you to go before it gets shut down. You will have a fantastic night out, seeing those majestic creatures doing what they are bred to do – race. What better way to send the message to our anti-human political class to keep their hands off our greyhounds.

Ken McLaughlin is an academic and author. His latest book is Stigma – and its discontents.