The Tangled Past and Unsettled Future of Greyhound Racing in West Virginia
May 28, 2025 at 10:21PMMichelle Orange’s excellent Oxford American piece takes us to the Wheeling Island Hotel, Casino & Racetrack in Wheeling, West Virginia, one of only two active greyhound racing facilities remaining in the United States. There, Orange covers the deep divides between greyhound racing proponents and the lobbyists determined to put an end to a sport they deem cruel.
I said goodbye to Fred, leaving him to the rest of the day’s betting. I wondered if he had witnessed, in his nearly forty years of regular greyhound wagering, what I feared that afternoon: an accident, a collision, a fatal event. A dog flying ass-over-teakettle and snapping its long equine neck. Three days prior, a dog named Klarity suffered a career-ending fracture during the fourteenth race of the day. Across the preceding two years, the state documented over a thousand greyhound racing injuries. In 2024, eleven dogs were euthanized, statewide, as a result of their injuries. Some dog deaths, like that of GF St Barts, who raced in a torrential downpour at Mardi Gras on April 5, 2022, are not noted in the records: because Barts died of a fractured skull on the track, and not at the hands of a state veterinarian, his death was not added to the tally. Video footage of that race has been removed from the track websites, which house a catalog of replays dating back to 2015. Footage of five of the sixteen races that resulted in a dog’s death between January 2023 and May 2024 cannot be found in the archives.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/28/the-tangled-past-and-unsettled-future-of-greyhound-racing-in-west-virginia/
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