Victorian greyhounds to benefit from new digital tracking program
The Government of Victoria and Greyhound Racing Victoria (GRV) have announced an investment of over $2 million in a Comprehensive Digital Tracking Program for greyhounds.
The program aims to enhance the monitoring of greyhounds whereabouts, care, and medical history throughout their lives.
It will create a database for all registered greyhounds, ensuring that information about their location and well-being is stored digitally from birth through their racing careers to retirement and adoption.
The initiative will significantly improve GRVs ability to oversee, track, and safeguard the welfare of greyhounds in Victoria.
The state government is providing $1.67 million for the project, with GRV contributing $418,000.
The project will launch in the design and planning phases before going into full implementation by 2026.
It is understood that Greyhound Racing South Australia (GRSA) has entered into a memorandum of understanding to also adopt the GRV's greyhound tracking technology.
The NSW Greyhound Welfare and Integrity Commission (GWIC), as one of the major commitments in the wake of the unfortunate NSW greyhound ban, has already developed similar software for whole-life greyhound tracking for greyhounds in NSW.
Current Victorian tracking methods for greyhounds involve checkpoints such as microchipping at 12 weeks old, registration, naming, racing event participation, breeding protocols, movements between locations, kennel inspections, retirement arrangements, and rehoming procedures.
However, many of these checkpoints rely on time consuming manual documentation methods that are prone to errors.
The upcoming digital tracking initiative for greyhounds will introduce solutions for registrations that record microchip scans and locations digitally at the time they occur.
It will also provide options for participants to register their greyhounds digitally at different stages of life.
While the Victorian upgrade to greyhound tracking is admirable, it is deeply disappointing that neither Greyhounds Australasia (GA), nor Greyhounds Clubs Australia (GCA), as the only two notionally national bodies in the sport, have not taken the lead and developed or demanded a single national database that would better reflect the true cross-border nature of modern transport and greyhound racing.
In the absence of a national approach, petty state politics and personalities will continue to ensure duplicated costs are a burden to the industry as a whole.
The narrow-minded, state based approach to all things is no better demonstrated by the continuation of state-based greyhound databases, which continue to add duplicate costs while industry revenues fall.