Brooklyn’s death in June at the age of 13 was much more than just the sad passing of a beloved pet. It was met with an outpouring of grief and thousands of messages from people worldwide for whom he was a symbol of hope in the battle to close greyhound racing tracks.
SIMON PARRY: Even in his last yards, Brooklyn refused to accept that his race was run. Stricken with cancer, paralysed and struggling to breathe, he clung to life, believing he could defy the odds one last time. “He didn’t want to go, and that was the hardest part,” says animal welfare campaigner Carey Theil who – with wife Christine Dorchak – nursed Brooklyn, a former racing greyhound, through his dying days at their home in Massachusetts, in the United States.
“We wanted Brooklyn to pass naturally, but he wouldn’t leave. He wasn’t eating and his body was shutting down, and yet he hung on for days and days, because he just didn’t want to go. “In the end, we couldn’t stop that terrible cancer that overcame him and took away his ability to breathe. That’s what made the decision for us. We couldn’t watch him suffer any longer and we knew the time had come.”
Brooklyn’s death in June at the age of 13 was much more than just the sad passing of a beloved pet. It was met with an outpouring of grief and thousands of messages from people worldwide for whom he was a symbol of hope in the battle to close greyhound racing tracks. Brooklyn’s story should have ended quietly more than a decade earlier, when he was condemned to die at Macau’s notorious Canidrome dog racing track – a venue where for 80 years no dog had come out alive.
The fight began after an investigation by Post Magazine in 2011 revealed how – with no adoption facilities in densely populated Macau – young, healthy greyhounds who finished outside the top three in a handful of consecutive races were routinely exterminated by lethal injection. Dogs were being destroyed at a rate of around 30 a month – nearly 400 a year – to be replaced by hounds newly imported from Australia. No greyhound survived for more than three years in the bleak and run-down concrete complex.
The Post Magazine investigation set off a global campaign by animal welfare groups that finally closed the Canidrome in 2018 and, by a curious twist of fate, Brooklyn became the beating heart of that campaign.
As a racing dog, Brooklyn was far from remarkable. In fact, he was a perennial loser. His breeder in New South Wales hoped he would follow in the pawprints of his grandfather, a dog called Brett Lee who was one of the fastest greyhounds ever. This dog, who had broken a succession of all-time records, was sold to a consortium in Australia in 2002 for A$800,000, and after his retirement commanded stud fees of A$8,800.
But the speed gene bypassed Brooklyn, who never finished better than fifth in a series of races in his home country and picked up winnings of just A$140 before, at the age of two, he was exported to the Canidrome, where his losing streak continued.
Four months after the Post Magazine investigation was published, anti-greyhound-racing charity GREY2K USA board member Charmaine Settle visited the Canidrome and returned with a haunting image of Brooklyn. By then, in October 2011, Brooklyn had run and lost enough races to share the apparently inescapable fate of countless other young greyhounds imported to Macau.
But the picture of Brooklyn – looking sleek, alert, intelligent and mildly anxious while muzzled and leashed to a fence – changed everything. “As soon as I saw this dog, something came over me,” says the charity’s founder Dorchak, who runs GREY2K USA with her husband Theil. “The eyes of that dog spoke to me and we said, ‘This has to be a campaign to rescue Brooklyn.’ And that’s how it all began”. SOURCE…
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