Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The head of Tasmania's Greyhound Adoption Program has been found guilty of racing a drugged dog and is currently suspended. I would have thought it to be a reasonable community expectation that the Tasmanian government would now step in and review having this trainer continuing to run the taxpayer-funded GAP animal welfare program. Obviously it's deeply worrying that the dog in question was drugged, even if it was unwittingly. In my opinion, having any trainer running GAP is a huge conflict of interest, but, when that trainer is suspended for a drugged racing dog, it turns the industry's flagship public relations exercise into an unmitigated PR disaster. Moreover, questions remain: was the unregulated meat referred to in the steward's decision horsemeat? Certainly we know that many of the racehorses that don't run fast enough are butchered and turned into dog food. Again, we see how gambling underpins the cruel animal-racing industries, each with their own entirely unacceptable animal death tolls. In July the Tasmanian Office of Racing Integrity released figures that show 1,412 greyhounds were euthanised in the past five years. That's almost one dog a day killed just because it didn't run fast enough. Indeed, the evidence just keeps stacking up that this unethical and cruel industry must be shut down immediately.