Until last night, I thought the reason the Tri-State Greyhound Park in Cross Lanes/Nitro continues to operate is because dog racing makes a lot of money.
It doesn't.
Until last night, I thought that if a business was doing something cruel and barbaric, good decent people could simply boycott that business and force them to change.
Last night I found out you've already boycotted dog racing at the Tri-State Greyhound Park and that you continue to boycott it and that sometimes there are more dogs on the track than spectators in the stands for the races so while boycotting may work when an online book retailer sells pedophile instructional books it doesn't work against the dog racing industry because dog racing isn't kept alive by spectators who buy tickets it's kept alive by lobbyists who buy legislators.
At last night's Drinking Liberally meeting Jennifer Krebs, VP at Grey2KUSA.org, explained to us that dog racing is a dying business kept artificially alive by lobbyists who represent dog breeders. Krebs explained to us that. to keep the demand for racing dogs high, breeders' lobbyists have persuaded legislators to pass laws that require casinos to maintain live animal racing. Krebs explained that in states where casino gambling has been de-coupled from live animal racing, live animal racing dies because there's no money in it. Live animal racing is a "loss leader". Very few of you, it seems, actually enjoy watching greyhounds crash into each other and take bone breaking, "career" ending tumbles so if free market forces were allowed to work, casinos like the one at Cross Lanes wouldn't continue to operate dog racing tracks.
Here's who makes money from dog racing: dog breeders, the breeders' lobbyists and the legislators who are wined and dined by the breeders' lobbyists.
Free market forces alone won't rid the state of West Virginia from this cruel, money-losing industry. Only legislation will get the job done. And the good news is that we don't even need legislation to outlaw dog racing, all we need is legislation that de-couples live animal racing from casino gambling.
By the way, I also learned last night that one of the big breeders in the state of West Virginia is acting-as-if-he-were-the-governor-Tomblin's mother, Freda.
For more on how human activity keeps animal populations artificially high and animal suffering unnecessarily frequent, see my July 1, 2009 post at ::http://higginbothamatlarge.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-to-reduce-animal-suffering-by-doing.html
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