My pandemic puppy is a retired racing greyhound. Zoom's gangly, genial and 3 years old. Sleek and black as an eel — and voluptuously lazy — he's among hundreds of dogs who suddenly needed homes after COVID-19's lethal spread across the country closed down race tracks along with most everything else.
Birmingham Race Course in Alabama was where Zoom sprinted a few times a week alongside seven other dogs for a breakneck quarter of a mile. The course reopened in June, offering billiards, darts and betting machines, but no more live dog racing.
"Let's see what the future holds for us and the industry," the company's vice-president of operations, Walter Russell, told NPR in a social media message.
"I think this is the end," says Michael Owens. She runs the Virginia-based greyhound adoption group Sighthound Underground, which matched me with Zoom in April. She means not just the end in Birmingham, but the end of greyhound racing across the country. "Tracks keep closing and closing. There are fewer and fewer greyhounds. When I started [the organization] 15 years ago, there were maybe 30,000 greyhounds registered every year. And last year there were 3,000."
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