The fastest dog on earth, and it is a couch animal, and the name has nothing to do with the colour
The Greyhound holds a 4.0 from two hundred and twenty-four reviews, charges ten to twenty pounds, and the animal in the name is not grey, and the name has nothing to do with the colour.
The etymology
Which is contested, and which is not about the colour.
The old form is grighund – and the first element is not grey.
It may relate to an Old Norse word for a bitch, or to a word meaning fair or noble. And hund is simply hound.
Nobody is certain. Greyhounds come in every colour there is – black, brindle, fawn, white – and grey is one of the rarer ones.
What it actually is
The fastest dog on earth, and one of the fastest land animals of any kind – and it is built for exactly one thing.
A deep chest, for an enormous heart and enormous lungs. A flexible spine, which folds and extends like a bow, so the back legs come past the front ones at full stretch.
And for a substantial fraction of a gallop, all four feet are off the ground.
It is a sprinter, not a runner. It is anaerobic. It goes extremely fast for about thirty seconds and then it is finished.
And then it sleeps
Which is the part that surprises everybody.
Because a greyhound is, in a domestic setting, one of the laziest dogs there is.
They sleep something in the region of eighteen to twenty hours a day. They are quiet. They do not need enormous exercise – a couple of short sprints and they are content.
They are frequently described, by the people who keep them, as forty-mile-an-hour couch potatoes.
Which is precisely what a sprinter should be. You do not conserve energy by fidgeting.
Which is the finding
Eight postcodes and thirteen hundred and eleven articles.
The sign is not the thing.
And an animal whose entire public identity is speed spends ninety per cent of its life asleep on a sofa – and the people who rescue the retired racers say it is the single most common surprise.
And the racing is the problem
Which has to be said.
Because a racing greyhound has a very short career – two or three years – and then it is surplus.
And what happens to it afterwards depends entirely on whether anybody has arranged for something to happen.
The rehoming charities do enormous work. Attitudes in the industry have improved considerably.
And the number of dogs involved is very large, and the maths of it is uncomfortable, and the honest position is that the sport produces more dogs than it can place and always has.
Which is not a moral failing on anybody’s part. It is arithmetic – a breeding operation sized for the fastest ten per cent produces ninety per cent that are not fast enough, and they are all still dogs.
Verdict
Honest number.
Verdict
Honest number.
My dad said this should be required reading for anyone who thinks government works. He’s not wrong.