The board have now made an attempt to regulate this and make it more transparent. It has introduced a medication booklet which is greatly appreciated. Any vet who sees a dog now will be asked to fill in the medication that was prescribed on that day. If a dog were tested six or eight weeks later and that came up in a hearing, it would be reflected in the hearing that the vet had prescribed the medication for a good veterinary reason.

There are two different situations: the prohibited substances and the controlled substances. The member alluded to things coming through the feed chain. There is some evidence that tiny residues of certain drugs can come through the food chain. That is similar in horse racing. As far back as the 1980s, Tied Cottage won the Cheltenham Gold Cup and he lost it subsequently because of a food contamination issue. That is common across many sporting organisations.

The way to manage that is to have very low thresholds for these contaminants that can come into the system. The issue is that certain contaminants have been found in greyhounds. One was procaine four or five years ago. Procaine is a local anaesthetic but it is also a cocaine-type analogue. It can be prescribed as a local anaesthetic and in theory it could have come through the food chain. Many dogs tested positive for procaine, however, details of the levels of procaine in the samples were never published, which was the critical thing. One could imagine that very low levels of procaine could be residues of feeding or something like that, whereas one would not expect very high levels to come through the food chain. One would expect the sanction to reflect the levels.

The member asked about strict liability. We have a slightly different way of managing it than the GBGB does in the UK. In the UK a person running a dog as a trainer or owner essentially becomes a member of a club and accepts the rules of the club when signing. At the moment that is not how things are managed here under the 1957 Act and there is an opportunity to change things now. There are many more legal-type sanctions involved.

Obviously, there should be a gradation of sanctions depending on the severity of the substance and the level and the number of offences. I think everybody is happy with that proposal.

Was there any other aspect of-----