Greyhound Welfare in Numbers: GBGB Injury, Retirement and Rehoming Data

Numbers do not settle moral arguments, but they do clarify what is actually happening. The welfare debate around UK greyhound racing is charged with emotion on both sides, and the temptation is to pick the statistic that supports your position and ignore the rest. I am not interested in cheerleading or campaigning – I am interested in what the GBGB data actually says, what it means for tracks like Harlow, and where the numbers leave genuine questions unanswered. This piece walks through the key welfare metrics from the most recent GBGB reporting cycle and lets you form your own view.

Injury Rates Across GBGB-Licensed Tracks

In 2024, GBGB recorded 3,809 injuries from 355,682 individual starts across all licensed tracks – an injury rate of 1.07%. That figure is the lowest on record and represents a sustained downward trend from the rates published in earlier years. To contextualise that percentage: for every 100 times a greyhound enters a trap and races, approximately one results in an injury that requires veterinary attention.

The breakdown by injury type reveals where the physical toll concentrates. The most common category is muscular injuries to the hind limbs – 1,013 cases in 2024, or 0.28% of starts. Hock joint injuries follow at 718 cases and 0.20% of starts. These are the two areas of the greyhound body that absorb the most stress during racing, particularly through bends where lateral forces load the inside leg. At tracks with tighter bends like Harlow’s 334-metre circuit, the biomechanical demands are arguably greater than at larger, sweeping ovals, though GBGB does not publish track-specific injury breakdowns that would confirm this directly.

The trackside fatality rate has also declined, falling from 0.06% of starts in 2020 to 0.03% in 2024 – a halving over four years. In absolute terms, 123 greyhounds died on track or were euthanised trackside in 2024 as a result of racing injuries. That figure is lower than any previous year in the published data set, but it is not zero, and whether a non-zero fatality rate is acceptable is a question that the numbers alone cannot answer.

Retirement and Rehoming: 94% and Rising

The most improved metric in GBGB’s welfare portfolio is rehoming. In 2024, 94% of greyhounds that finished their racing careers were successfully rehomed – up from 88% in 2018. The improvement reflects investment in rehoming infrastructure, including the Greyhound Retirement Scheme that has distributed more than 5.6 million pounds to homing centres since 2020.

Adoptions from GRS-affiliated centres surged 37% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, suggesting that the upward trend in rehoming has accelerated. The Greyhound Trust, the sport’s largest rehoming charity, works alongside GBGB-funded centres to place retired racers in domestic homes, and the combined network has capacity to handle the current volume of retirees – though that capacity would be strained if retirements increased sharply due to track closures or a contraction in the racing population.

The 94% figure leaves 6% unaccounted for in the rehoming pipeline. GBGB’s published data does not fully disaggregate that 6%, which includes dogs retained by trainers or owners, dogs transferred to non-affiliated rehoming organisations, and dogs whose outcomes are recorded as “unknown.” The Greyhound Trust’s chief executive, Lisa Morris-Tomkins, has stated that the number of racing greyhounds who never experience a loving home remains unacceptable and that the baseline figures must improve. That criticism, coming from within the sport’s own welfare structure, acknowledges that 94% is progress but not yet completion.

Economic Euthanasia: From 175 to 3

The single most dramatic number in GBGB’s welfare data is the decline in economic euthanasia – the practice of putting down a healthy or treatable greyhound because the cost of treatment exceeds the dog’s perceived commercial value. In 2018, 175 greyhounds were euthanised for economic reasons. In 2024, that figure was 3. A 98% reduction in six years.

GBGB’s Injury Retirement Scheme, which has paid out nearly 1.5 million pounds since its launch in December 2018, funds veterinary treatment for dogs that would otherwise have been euthanised for cost reasons. The scheme covers surgical procedures, rehabilitation and post-treatment rehoming, removing the financial barrier that previously led trainers and owners to opt for euthanasia when treatment costs exceeded the dog’s racing value.

Mark Bird, GBGB’s chief executive, has described the reduction in economic euthanasia as an area of particular pride, noting that the board has been clear that putting a greyhound to sleep for economic reasons is unacceptable. The data supports the claim: the combination of financial support, cultural change within the training community, and regulatory enforcement has effectively eliminated economic euthanasia as a systemic practice at GBGB-licensed tracks.

The remaining three cases in 2024 represent outliers rather than a systemic failure, and GBGB has indicated that each case was reviewed and investigated. Whether the figure can reach zero is an open question – medicine cannot save every patient, and some injuries are so severe that euthanasia is a welfare decision rather than an economic one. But the trajectory from 175 to 3 in six years is the clearest evidence the sport can offer that its welfare framework is producing results.

Where Critics Say the Data Falls Short

The GBGB data tells a genuine story of improvement, but critics argue it is an incomplete story. The Cut the Chase coalition – a group of animal welfare organisations – has highlighted the cumulative toll: between 2017 and 2024, GBGB data records 35,168 injuries and 1,353 trackside fatalities across licensed tracks. Those are aggregate numbers over seven years, and while the annual trend is downward, the cumulative figures are substantial.

The coalition has emphasised that each individual loss matters, and the aggregate scale of harm over multiple years undercuts the narrative of a reformed sport. The tension between “improving year-on-year” and “still causing thousands of injuries per year” is the fault line of the welfare debate, and both statements are factually accurate.

A more structural criticism concerns data transparency. GBGB publishes national aggregate figures but does not break them down by individual track. A punter at Harlow cannot look up Harlow’s specific injury rate, fatality count or rehoming percentage – the data is pooled across all 18 licensed stadiums. Track-level reporting would allow more granular accountability and let individual stadiums demonstrate their welfare performance, but GBGB has not moved to that level of disclosure.

Campaigners also question whether the rehoming figures capture long-term outcomes. A dog counted as “rehomed” in GBGB’s data may subsequently be returned to a centre if the adoption fails, and the data does not track returns or long-term placement stability. The 94% rehoming rate is a point-of-exit figure rather than a lifetime outcome measure, and the distinction matters for anyone attempting to assess welfare outcomes comprehensively.

These criticisms do not invalidate the data, but they do frame it. The GBGB numbers represent genuine and measurable progress on multiple fronts. They also describe an activity in which thousands of animals are injured annually and over a hundred die. Where you land on the welfare question depends on whether you view the trajectory or the absolute level as the more important metric – and reasonable people disagree.