Barbaric bloodsport or way of life: Are coursing's days numbered?
It’s a sunny day and James Kelleher is standing in the rear car park of Clonmel’s Powerstown Park racecourse, glancing nervously towards a paddock where dogs are being walked in advance of their competition.
Once his dog goes through the small gate at the end of the compound, in a matter of just over 12 seconds, one way or another, it will all be over for James, a trainer from Macroom.
He’s here because a dog he trained, Sore Loser, is about to run. And despite the ultimate goal of a €40,000 prize, the emotional stakes are even higher because this is a family affair: James’ 12-year-old daughter, Katie, is part-owner of Sore Loser. And as the dog’s name suggests, Katie really wants her dog to win.
It’s the first day of the three-day National Coursing Meeting in Clonmel.
To many, hare coursing is a barbaric bloodsport that should be banned.
But to the 30,000 punters, owners, breeders and trainers that gathered for the Irish Coursing Club’s (ICC) 97th annual three-day event last weekend, James and Katie included, it’s a way of life.
Dogs competing at the champion stakes have made it through a season which begins in the last weekend of September.
They have picked up wins at regional “trial stakes,” accumulating points to qualify for the national event.
How does James fancy Sore Loser´s chances? “We’ll need a miracle,” he says with a wry grin.
Out at the track, Cork County councillor Eileen Lynch, a third generation dog owner and trainer, waits for the Derby to begin.
Eileen, from Knockrour near Macroom, is a member of the ICC’s executive board and has been involved in coursing all her life:
Her grandfather trained dogs in the 40s, and her father had several notable wins in the seventies and 80s.
She looks around at the packed out stands and the buzz of the bookmakers’ stalls, where the turf accountants are doing a brisk trade.
“The achievement to get here is an amazing one,” the 32-year-old Fine Gael councillor adds.
“The dogs are treated very well: we train them, we get them ready and ultimately this competition is where you’re trying to get.”
Does she have dogs competing today? She pulls a face: “Unfortunately not. I won a cup this year and an open stake, but none that qualified.”
The Derby in which Sore Loser is about to run is for male dogs.
It’s the second competition of the day. It was a crisp morning, sunny but with a heavy frost: the first event of the day, the Oaks, for bitches, was postponed by half an hour due to concern about the hard ground, which can cause injuries such as broken toes amongst the dogs.
Ireland is now one of just three EU countries to allow hare coursing: even in Britain, where the practice originated, an all-out ban on coursing was instituted under Tony Blair’s government in 2005.
In fact, British coursing fans cross the Irish Sea regularly to attend legal Irish events, and there are plenty of English accents evident in Clonmel.
In Ireland, a sort of middle ground has been adopted.
Ever since 1993, when coursing came under pressure from Tony Gregory’s bill to ban the practice, dogs have worn muzzles to compete.
This has reduced the number of hares killed or injured, but anti-bloodsports campaigners say it’s still cruel: the hare can be “pinned” by dogs if they catch up with it too soon, crashing their muzzle against the animal and causing injuries.
Hares weigh between 3kg and 4kg, while the dogs weigh between 25kg and 40kg.
Over this year’s three-day National, the ICC tells the Irish Examiner in a follow-up query, 202 hares were coursed, 80 each on days one and two, and 42 on the final day. They reported no hare fatalities and all hares were released back into the wild on February 8.
The Irish Parks and Wildlife Service (IPWS) now publishes returns from Ireland’s 80-plus coursing club on its website, including numbers of hares pinned or injured, those seen by a vet and a tally of those netted each year and those released.
Numbers of pinned and deaths for this year may be one or two instances, from anything up to 70 hares caught and released by bigger clubs.
But for campaigners against coursing, lower fatalities among hares in muzzled coursing is not an argument for it to continue: the very idea of catching a wild animal and pitting it against a much larger creature purely for human entertainment is unacceptable.
Now, there’s a new bill at the second stage before the Dáil, the Animal Health and Welfare (Ban on Hare Coursing) Bill 2020, proposed by People Before Profit’s Paul Murphy.
Several local authorities have also weighed in, with Fingal County Council passing a motion to ban hare coursing last November.
But at a Cork County Council meeting this January, two Green Party councillors, Cllr Liam Quaide and Cllr Alan O’Connor's motion to ban hare coursing was roundly rejected: they got the support of just two other councillors.
A large number of rural councillors professed not only support for coursing, but also said they attended events.
Bandon councillor Gillian Coughlan, FF, said the ban was rooted in the idea of “cancel culture,” saying that we don’t want to live in a world where we ban everything that we personally dislike or disagree with.
Eileen Lynch gave an impassioned speech during the debate, and in the media aftermath, where she gave interviews on local and national radio, she was subjected to personal abuse on social media.
“Look, it’s very emotive and I don’t mind that,” she says with a sigh.
“As far as the two Green Party councillors go, cool, they’re entitled to their opinions.
Although there are children and young people present at the National Coursing Meeting, the older age profile of the crowd is notable.
Does Eileen believe that times — and social mores — are changing and that coursing’s days are numbered?
“I don’t see that. There are still a lot of people involved in it, all over the country and I think there’s still political support for it.
"As long as it continues to be above board and regulated, and working closely with the Irish Parks and Wildlife Service.”
Facts around coursing are heavily contested by both pro- and anti-coursing interests.
A Red C Poll commissioned by the Irish Council Against Bloodsports (ICAB) in 2019 found that 77% of Irish people were in favour of the government banning coursing.
But Eileen takes issue with the fact that the poll was commissioned by ICAB and says the wording of polls can be decisive.
Similarly ICAB disputes the methodology of a Queen’s University Belfast study dating to 2010 which found that areas managed by coursing clubs had greater numbers of hares than “the wider countryside”.
This study is frequently cited by coursing advocates to argue that coursing clubs are actually instrumental in conserving wild hare populations.
But Aideen Yourell of ICAB says it’s subject to selection bias because coursing clubs exist in areas of already high hare density, that she doesn’t trust its independence.
One of the criticisms levelled at Cllr Liam Quaide and his colleague Cllr Alan O’Connor when they proposed their coursing ban motion was that they had never attended a coursing event themselves, that they are trying to ban something they have no working knowledge of.
Liam says he would find it “too upsetting” to attend a hare coursing event.
“I can appreciate that argument about seeing an activity up close before coming to conclusions about it, but you get an understanding of it from what we can see on videos online,” he said.
Those gathered for the National Coursing Meeting don’t believe coursing is cruel to the hare: talking to people, the most common comments are that the hare is trained and knows how to escape, that hares face many natural predators and have evolved for speed and evasive behaviours.
They also say that industrial farming involves much more animal suffering than coursing, but that no-one is trying to force an all-out ban on that.
“That is a valid point actually,” Liam said. “Live exports, for instance, are probably just as cruel if not worse than hare coursing, and something I would probably feel even stronger about.
"You could certainly question why we’d be so morally outraged by hare coursing if we’re willing to eat factory-farmed meat, because while hare coursing is an entertainment spectacle and someone could argue that we all need to eat, we don’t necessarily need to eat factory-farmed chicken.
“But there’s also validity to the point that two wrongs don’t make a right.”
For Liam, the defeat of his council hare-coursing motion is not the end: “Much as this was roundly defeated, it generated a lot of public debate and a lot of public interest.
"And I think it does reflect the majority of public opinion.”
One argument seems to annoy people on both sides of the debate: the framing of the issue as an urban-rural divide, as city-dwellers interfering with country ways of life they don’t understand.
Liam grew up in rural Co Limerick, but says that he knew more people that were opposed to coursing than in favour of it.
And out by the track, Claire O’Reilly, who now lives in Freemount in North Cork, says she’s a coursing fan who grew up a city-slicker: Claire is originally from Blackrock in Cork city and her family always kept dogs for coursing.
Claire is also here to see Sore Loser run: her husband Donal is part-owner of the dog, so Claire is watching the Derby with especial interest.
The hare is released and runs halfway down the 420m course before the red-coated handler, called the “slipper,” releases the dogs.
A judge, also in a red coat, rides alongside on horseback and makes a final decision on the winner.
The winning dog is the first to “turn” the hare by making it change direction, or, in many instances where neither dog catches up with the hare and it escapes down a run through to the compound, the dog that ran the fastest wins.
It also often happens that the dogs turn the hare well before the end of the line, in which case the hare finds itself weaving desperately between the two dogs, trying to find an escape route to safety. This is when there’s a risk of pinning.
In some instances, the hare is released and the dogs aren’t: if the slipper is in doubt about the hare’s condition, he doesn’t release the dogs. Everyone you speak to in Clonmel is adamant that the goal of coursing is not to see hares injured.
“It’s not in our interest to have hares die,” Eileen says. “We don’t want to see that.
The course is so far from where the spectators stand that, unless you’re watching on a big screen, the hare is a distant blur. It’s hard to get a sense of the immediacy of it, apart from the occasional yelping of the dogs.
The speed of each round is phenomenal: just over 12 seconds on the course, and it’s all over. The hare runs behind a barrier back to the compound.
Sore Loser goes on to win the T.A. Morris Stakes by end of the weekend.
To Aideen Yourell of ICAB, the public spectacle witnessed during the National Coursing Meeting is not the full story.
She’s strongly dismissive of the idea that because the hare is “trained” it’s less cruel, and says netting and training processes themselves are cruel.
“They keep them in compounds for weeks on end, and they chase the hares up and down the field to get them familiar with where the escape area is,” she says.
“The men shout and roar and the hare runs up and down the field: it’s a wild animal, it’s not supposed to be subjected to stress like that.”
Aideen, who comes from Mullingar, has been campaigning against hare coursing since the 80s, before the introduction of muzzles.
To her, it’s simple: coursing is animal cruelty and must be banned.
“If you took a cat and got two dogs to chase it, you would be guilty of an offence and you’d be charged under the Animal Health and Welfare Act.
"Hare coursing is exempted from that act. That’s an admission of cruelty, that they have to create an exemption from prosecution.”
Another major concern for animal welfare activists like Aideen is “blooding,” the hidden practice of giving dogs live bait, often cats or rabbits, to encourage their instincts to catch a live lure.
Eileen Lynch is adamant that dogs within regulated coursing are “absolutely not” blooded as part of their training and says that a ban on regulated coursing will result in more illegal coursing.
Then there’s the welfare of the dogs themselves: Aideen points to the 2019 'Running for their Lives' documentary, which revealed an internal Irish Greyhound Board report that almost 6,000 of the annual 16,000 track greyhounds born each year are killed.
The ICC, which has authority over breeding and stud books in Ireland, is a separate body from the state-funded IGB, Eileen Lynch responds.
“Most dogs course for a minimum of two seasons,” Eileen says. “Generally dogs are only put down due to injury. It’s highly regulated. ICC keeps records of what happens to dogs, as the stud book keeper.
"Even in the event that your dog takes a few weeks off, you can be contacted to see where he is. There's also been a lot of work done on rehoming.”
The ICC reports a total of 30,000 people attended the National Coursing Meeting this year. Just under €250,000 of prize money was handed out.
It can cost €100 per week for an owner to kennel a dog with a good trainer, Eileen says.
A young couple from Co Laois noted that all the hotels in Clonmel were full for the duration of the three-day event.
The headline sponsor at the National Coursing Meeting is Boyle Sports. It’s clear that coursing is big business, and a part of the livelihood of many people. That it’s worth a lot to the local economy.
Although Aideen is also opposed to greyhound track racing, she thinks that removing the hare from the coursing equation could be a more humane alternative: she points out that drag coursing, where dogs chase a moving rag, is popular in Australia where hare coursing is banned.
“I’ve filmed drag coursing in Listry and it shows dogs enthusiastically following a rag and there were people there enjoying themselves,” she says.
But she says there is little appetite for change among the Irish coursing community.
Certainly, Eileen Lynch doesn’t believe that a switch to drag racing would be a suitable alternative for the highly specialised dogs in coursing. She would prefer if things stayed the way they are.
“I do take that argument,” she says. “But a track dog and a coursing dog are different. Coursing is synonymous with the conservation of the hare as well. If you get rid of coursing clubs, where are the money and funds and people going to come from to look after them?
“I get it if you’re not into, it but it’s just a part of our heritage. It’s part of what we do.”
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