Ms Jessica Reid:

I know of convictions not necessarily specific to greyhound, but other animal welfare breaches.

One has to be very careful if one has a situation where one thinks there can be a prosecution. It is advised to keep that off social media because it can lead to a problem with evidence that is given in court, if it is taken as a criminal prosecution. There was a case in Galway with a rescue. A serious case was taken against them and because the case proceeded over a number of years anyone who was involved in seizing the animals off that property, that were taken in horrible situations, could not speak about it publicly for some time. In some cases, if images are being shared it is just for public awareness.

In the case of greyhounds, it comes down to a numbers game. Because we do not know exactly how many dogs are being bred every year, all we have is a registered number of litters to work off, so it is an extrapolation of 15,000 to 20,000 greyhounds being bred in Ireland every year and out of that number, approximately 1,000 greyhounds per year are being re-homed. We know that a certain number get sold on to race in the UK and then a certain number are being sold to other places. We have done the figures as best as we possibly can from the information that is available. One of our biggest issues is the fact that the information is not readily available on a concrete specific number of dogs. We are still looking at thousands if not tens of thousands of dogs - healthy young dogs - that have been euthanised. Some of them are being euthanised privately through vets. Some of them are undergoing DIY euthanasia. There are all sorts of different cases. There is no way we can know how many, given the current numbers of dogs being bred. We know the numbers that are being homed but there is a huge gap in the middle and we do not know what happens to all of them, although we can guess. It is hard to produce numbers based on guesswork because at the end of the day those are always in question. One of our biggest issues is the fact that we cannot get those numbers because they do not seem to be recorded at this point. One cannot tackle a problem properly until one knows the full scope of it.

We know that it happens daily or weekly with rescues. We operate a waiting list of dogs coming in. Trainers contact us to ask if we can take dogs. We put them on a waiting list and try to find spaces for them. However, when we contact that trainer to say we have a spot for the dogs now, we may be told: "Sorry, those dogs are gone. I couldn't wait long enough, so I had them put down." That happens daily in this country. That is where the numbers of hundreds and thousands of dogs that are being lost come from because we physically do not have the space, resources or volunteer time to deal with these dogs that are coming in such overwhelming numbers. Trainers may ring up and say: "If you can't take this dog this week he gets the needle. We already have an appointment to have the dog euthanised with the vet at the end of the week, so if you can't take it by then that is the outcome." One is left with that sort of emotional blackmail.

Individual rescuers are doing this work in their volunteer hours. That is not to say that the dogs are necessarily being kept in bad shape. They can be in good physical condition when they are brought in. It is simply a numbers game. The committee has seen the numbers we have provided of the allocated resources, which are so poorly insufficient for the number of dogs still being bred. They are running in this industry but are not being taken care of at the end of the day.