GRI ‘fully satisfied’ with accuracy of racing dog traceability system

Nuala Donlon of greyhound welfare advocates Greyhound Action Ireland said that not integrating the two systems amounted to a serious 'design failure'. File Picture: Howard Crowdy

Greyhound Racing Ireland (GRI) said it is “fully satisfied” that its traceability welfare system for racing dogs is accurate despite thousands of more animals being accounted for on it compared with its own race cards.

The administrative body for greyhound racing in Ireland said that its traceability system, RCETS, and its own race management system “are separate operating software systems and perform entirely different functions”.

“As bespoke operating systems, one system does not purport to carry out the functions of the other,” a spokesperson said.

Those statements were delivered in response to an analysis of greyhound racing histories on the race management system, which found that the number of animals listed as being ‘active’ on GRI’s traceability system greatly exceeds the number of animals actually recorded as having been raced or trialled on the organisation’s own system over the same timeframe.

A traceability system was first developed by GRI in the fallout from a seismic documentary produced by RTÉ in 2019, which alleged that as many as 6,000 dogs were being culled each year for not being fast enough.

The traceability system was meant to bring transparency to the entire industry but campaigners now say the statistics are potentially meaningless.

GRI recently stated that 1,997 greyhounds born in 2021 were recorded as being active in the 42-day period to January 1 of this year, an unusually high figure given those animals would have passed the 48-month age mark commonly understood to be the time at which a dog’s racing capacity has been exhausted.

However, data from GRI’s own race management system shows that just 384 of those 2021 greyhounds were noted as having either raced or trialled during the same time period, a difference of 1,613.

The difference between the two figures was even more accentuated on April 17, 2024, when 4,368 greyhounds were noted as being active on the RCETS versus just 2,238 on the racing system, a difference of 2,130.

GRI noted that the status of animals on the traceability system is entirely dependent upon greyhound owners updating the system regarding the wellbeing of their dogs.

It did not respond to a query as to why the system was designed in this manner.

Some 5,250 owners were automatically suspended by GRI in 2025 for not updating RCETS as to the status of their animals.

GRI did not directly respond to queries as to why its traceability and race management systems were not integrated at the design stage, nor as to whether or not such a high level of suspensions call into question the reliability or usefulness of RCETS as a traceability system, though it did clarify that of the 5,832 animals born in 2021 recorded on the system who were not exported some 3,300 are now dead — a rate of just under 57%.

GRI is “fully satisfied the contemporaneous records provided are accurate and have no further comment to make at this juncture by delving in to any perceptions of inaccuracies,” a spokesperson said.

However, Nuala Donlon of greyhound welfare advocates Greyhound Action Ireland said that not integrating the two systems amounted to a serious “design failure”.

She argued that, without accurate racing and trialling data recorded on the traceability system, “it is impossible to know how many greyhounds are genuinely active in the racing dog pool, how long careers last, or at what point greyhounds drop out of the system”.

“GRI has, at all times, held accurate, real-time data on every greyhound that has raced or trialled at its stadia.

“That data exists in the race management system.

“The decision not to use that data to update or validate RCETS was not a technical limitation, it was a design choice,” Ms Donlon said.

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