I took this at the Knowsley Flower Show on Sun 9th August 2009 where the GRWE had an awareness stand to promote the charity and help look for homes for these wonderful hounds. If you’ve ever considered getting a rescue pet, I would highly recommend a rescue greyhound!

Here’s a wee gallery of some other photos taken on the day…

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 13

… can’t wait to see the results

This is one of my absolute favourite photos of Mimi and Milo

We phoned seven different agencies to get advice on what we had to do to get her picked up / out in a kennel for strays. On the way home I flagged a passing police van and asked them if they knew of a number to call etc. They told me it was the dog warden who was legally responsible for collecting and kennelling stray dogs.  The dog warden didn’t answer and apparently, from speaking to all the various charities (who couldn’t take the dog due to the legal requirement of going through the “dog warden”) the said dog warden service is a pile of shite. They see it as just a 9-5, Mon-Fri job, with no interest about dog welfare, there’s no out-of-hours contact, even though there’s supposed to be. Out of the seven agencies we contacted it was only the RSPCA who were interested in taking this dog in, because she was so mal-nourished.

She had quite a good demeanour about her once she knew she was in a safe environment and  she knew certain commands like “sit” etc, so it was obvious that she’d been domesticated so she should be easily re-homed. In fact, looking back, this reminds me of a post I wrote a while ago about a dog database. When the RSPCA guy turned up he scanned her for a microchip and she didn’t have one. It’s cases like this, which I’ve now experienced first-hand, when a database / compulsory chipping would be great. To either re-unite with a loving family, or prosecute an abandoner.

At work I’ve been really busy working on a few RHEL (Linux) and AIX (IBM UNIX – read ‘mainframe’) projects for a few of our clients. I actually really enjoyed most of the project work – it’s all really fascinating stuff, for me at least and very good for my career as a whole. All good stuff for the CV! I really feel that I’ve learnt and refined my linux skills quite a lot recently. I’ve got a Google notebook that is stuffed full of really useful tidbits of bash scripting and commands – I keep meaning to write a decent “crib-sheet” post on here for some of the most useful stuff.

Oh! I nearly forgot!! Mimi (our new greyhound) is the one on the right…

After taking in a rescue greyhound which has obviously had a terrible ordeal at the hands of some very cruel owners I’m all for this scheme and would gladly participate. It’s exactly because of the way that ex-racer greyhounds are treated in this country that I would be a strong supporter of this database, once racing greyhounds have lived out their racing career for the most part they’re just seen as an unwanted, disposable commodity which has no further value or monetary worth and are quickly abandoned. The fewer others are lucky enough to be used to stud or breed – but even after they’ve lost this value they’re seen as being useless and disposable.

A scheme such as this may help reduce the abandonment and mis-treatment of retired greyhounds as well as reducing overall mistreatment of the species.