Greyhound racing in Britain has celebrated its 100th birthday.
On the 24th of July 1926, 6 dogs chased a mechanical hare around a track in Manchester. A century later, the machinery has changed. The basic idea has not. Dogs are still being made to race around tracks so humans can gamble on who reaches the finish first.
And dogs are still dying.
In 2025, 161 greyhounds died at racetracks, either from fatal injuries or after being euthanised following an injury. Once the reduced number of races and tracks is taken into account, the analysis found that a dog was 77% more likely to die at the track than in 2022, when the Greyhound Board of Great Britain introduced its A Good Life for Every Greyhound strategy.
3 dogs dead every week.
Happy birthday.
The percentages hide the dogs
The industry can make these numbers sound reassuring. The risk of dying per race start increased from 0.03% to 0.05%. Tiny percentages. But greyhounds are not percentages.
A major 2026 report found 35,168 reported injuries between 2017 and 2024, including 1,353 deaths at tracks. Another 3,278 greyhounds were killed for other reasons, including treatment costs or because they were considered poor candidates for adoption.
There is another trick buried in the statistics. GBGB reports injuries against the number of “dog runs”, meaning the same dog can be counted again and again every time they race. That produces a much smaller-looking injury percentage than comparing injuries with the number of individual dogs being raced. Using the number of greyhounds eligible to race in 2021, the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission calculated an estimated 24.1% risk of injury in a single year. Over 2 years that rose to 42.4%. Over three, 56.3%. Those estimates did not include injuries during training because GBGB does not collect them. That sounds rather different from 0.05%, doesn’t it?
The track itself is dangerous
Greyhounds normally race counterclockwise around oval tracks. This places uneven forces on their bodies. Centrifugal force pulls them towards the outside fence. Dogs bunch together entering bends, increasing collisions and falls. One Australian analysis cited in the UK report attributed around 80% of catastrophic and major injuries to this bunching effect.
And racing is only part of their lives
The dogs do not spend most of their time running. They reportedly spend up to 95% of their lives in kennels. Investigators from the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission observed barren kennels containing wood shavings but no toys or other enrichment, and dogs with strips of missing fur consistent with rubbing against wire mesh.
Then there is breeding.
The report says around 83% of greyhounds racing in the UK are bred in Ireland, where an estimated 6,000 greyhounds a year have been killed for failing to run fast enough. About 6,250 surviving dogs have been exported to Britain annually.
Most racing careers are remarkably short. The newer population-level research examined 31,028 greyhounds and 1.27 million races between January 2022 and March 2026 and found that most dogs raced for only around a year. More than 95% of dogs who leave racing can no longer be checked through public reporting. They stop making money. Then, publicly at least, most simply disappear.
Who regulates the regulator?
There is another uncomfortable fact.
GBGB does not merely regulate greyhound racing. It also exists within an industry whose continuation it promotes. The organisation introduced A Good Life for Every Greyhound in 2022. But the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission examined the strategy and concluded that it was unlikely to have a significant impact. One criticism was particularly revealing. The strategy sought partly to modify dogs through breeding so they could better withstand the stresses of racing, rather than changing the environment causing the stress and injuries.
A century is enough
In 2026, Scotland and Wales both moved to end greyhound racing, while pressure has continued for England and Northern Ireland to follow.
The question is not whether the industry can shave another fraction from an injury statistic. It is why dogs should be bred, confined, raced, injured and discarded so humans can watch them run in circles and place bets.
Greyhound racing has had 100 years.
The dogs have had enough.