Libraries’ Thayer appears on national news about the end of greyhound racing

Gwynn Thayer, Interim Department Head of the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), was featured in an ABC News story and in an interview on WGN Radio about the end of greyhound racing in the US. 

Thayer, whose book Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture chronicles the history of the sport from a critical perspective, offered her opinion for the ABC story upon the closing of a track in Dubuque, Iowa. She also spoke at length with Lisa Dent on Chicago’s Afternoon News about the disappearance of greyhound racing more generally.

“It has declined more rapidly than I thought it would,” Thayer, who became interested in the history of the sport when she adopted a greyhound many years ago, told Dent. “I think that the controversy was in the earlier years, many decades ago, where there was not a robust adoption infrastructure for the greyhounds.”

In earlier days of the sport, dogs were destroyed after their racing days were over. But as concerns for the welfare of the dogs rose, interest in the sport itself waned. What was once a $3.5 billion annual sport in 1991 had shrunk to a seventh of that by 2014. Scholars at NC State such as the late Tom Regan have been a part of the rise of the Animal Welfare movement, which the Libraries has supported with one of the most important Animal Rights and Animal Welfare collections in the world housed in the SCRC.