England Is Running Out of Excuses

Scotland and Wales have both now agreed to ban greyhound racing.

For years, greyhounds have been used as disposable gambling equipment. They are bred for speed, pushed around tracks at up to 40mph, and discarded when their bodies give out or they stop being profitable. Broken legs, shattered backs, paralysis, head trauma, drugging, deaths on track, killings off track. This is what sits behind the polished language of “sport” and “entertainment”.

Animal Aid says more than 4,000 dogs were killed or euthanised in the greyhound racing industry between 2017 and 2024. The League Against Cruel Sports says 3,809 dogs were injured in 2024 alone, with at least 123 dying by the track. In Scotland, 13 dogs tested positive for cocaine in a single year. That is the industry. Not an anomaly. Not a few bad apples. The industry.

And still, defenders of greyhound racing want the public to believe the problem is poor regulation, bad management, or isolated incidents. No. The problem is using dogs as commodities in the first place. Once an animal’s body is turned into a source of income, welfare becomes secondary to extraction. Profit demands speed. Speed creates impact. Impact creates injuries. Injuries create deaths. That is not a bug in the system. That is the system working exactly as intended.

Scotland’s last track has already closed. Wales has just one remaining track. The industry is shrinking because public tolerance is shrinking with it. More people are seeing greyhound racing for what it is: a cruel relic kept alive by money, habit, and moral cowardice.

The bans in Scotland and Wales matter, not only because they will prevent future deaths, but because they expose the lie that this industry is somehow culturally important or socially valuable. Valuable to whom? Not to the dogs whose bodies are broken for a betting market. Not to the dogs doped, injured, abandoned, or killed. Not to the public, who are increasingly rejecting the idea that an animal’s fear and physical destruction can be dressed up as leisure.

England now looks even more out of step. The question is no longer whether greyhound racing can be made kinder. It cannot. The question is why any government still permits it.

Greyhounds are not machines. They are not chips in a gambling economy. They are not here to generate money until their bodies collapse.

Scotland and Wales have finally acted like that is true.

England should catch up.