We live in an age where we have come to expect the worst from even our top athletic champions across sports, but now we can’t even trust greyhounds to be playing by the rules, apparently.
Clonbrien Hero, an Irish greyhound racing champion, recently tested positive for cocaine. Yes, you read that correctly. This dog had a positive test for cocaine.
Trainer of champion greyhound that tested positive for cocaine tells @thetimesIE the dog could've got it from hands of ppl patting its head.
— Mark Tighe (@MarkLTighe) September 14, 2017
To be specific, Clonbrien Hero yielded a test with traces of benzoylecgonine, which is the main compound for cocaine. The substance was found in three separate tests, and of course, it is a banned substance for racing dogs. But just how did the dog gets its snout in some cocaine? The world of imagination doesn’t have to stretch too far for a possible answer, but the dog’s trainer suggests he picked it up from fans.
According to the trainer, the dog must have ingested the substance accidentally (don’t you hate accidentally ingesting cocaine?) and may have picked it up after being pet on the head by fans. Was one of those fans petting the dog with hands with traces of cocaine? If so, then the dog could have picked it up by scratching its head and then licking the paw to clean it. Sure, it’s a possibility, right? I mean, dogs do like to lick themselves.
Regardless of how it happened, the fact that it did happen is hilarious as long as the dog is OK. As far as we know for now, the dog is doing just fine.
[The Times/Photo: The Times]
There’s nothing “hilarious” about this. It’s another example of the rotten core of the greyhound racing industry. Not only is it populated with drug addicts, but the dogs live wretched lives of confinement, injury, and death, apart from the lucky survivors who manage to get adopted as pets. These gentle and loving animals are used as random number generators for the gambling industry – a holdover from the days a hundred years ago when there were no computers around that could do the same thing. Nobody even goes to the track any more to watch the 30-second races. They place their bets online and win or lose based entirely on the race outcome, like pulling a lever on a slot machine. Ban this wretched industry!