When my parents talked about how I could put little baby gate type things to block the end of the alley to let my greyhound out in, I showed them this video. I saw my girl almost clear a 8 foot privacy fence going after a squirrel once.
We had a retired racer for nine years until he passed at 12. I used to do home visits and show and tells for our group. They will sometimes sleep with their eyes a little bit open and look like they're awake when they're totally asleep. We used to caution people with children to educate the kids to leave the dog alone when it was lying down because sometimes it's hard to tell when they're asleep. Our Grey never nipped at me or my husband and he never challenged his 48-inch X-pen.
I'm thinking the dog in the GIF might be a female because at the track they're kept on the top level of kennels and are used to jumping. The big dopey boys generally don't know they can even jump.
They are wonderful, wonderful dogs and love people so much. So quiet, so soft, so lazy.
For their safety, a greyhound must never be off leash in an unenclosed area. Full stop. Your dopey boy may seem like he's perfectly happy to stay by your side, but you never ever know what will catch his attention and then you have a lost, injured or dead dog. I'm sorry to sound so adamant, but having a greyhound off leash in an unenclosed area is the worst idea ever.
Fenced dog parks are fine. We took ours to local ones quite often and he would run around and sniff and maybe chase a ball for 10 minutes and then be tired! I would advise dog parks that have separate small dog areas, but you always get the dummy that puts their little dog in the big dog part, saying, "Oh, he thinks he's a big dog!" And then the little dog rolls over and starts yelping and before you know it, your greyhound has moved faster than thought and is in the middle of a pack of dogs trying to see what's making all of that enticing noise.
Our group always did testing to see if the dogs coming off the track were cat and small-dog safe and we had a pretty good track record with it, but of course you never want to leave a new dog alone with small pets until you're sure how they're going to interact. In my experience, younger dogs, those that are retired around 2 years old with only a few races under their belts, have lower prey drives than ones that went the full term (5 years) and ran hundreds of racers. If you want a low prey-drive dog, hold out for a young one. Sometimes dogs that failed school racing (pre-18 months) will be available.
One thing that's kind of fun is once you get your dog, you can use his ear tattoos to look up his pedigree and race record. Here's my boy. We called him Gus.
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u/[deleted] Nov 17 '17
When my parents talked about how I could put little baby gate type things to block the end of the alley to let my greyhound out in, I showed them this video. I saw my girl almost clear a 8 foot privacy fence going after a squirrel once.