 Hi, this is Ross Fadero with Driving Forces at ACMI, and I'm here today with Christine Dorchak and Kerry Thiel, who are from Gray 2K, USA, worldwide, which is a dog-racing lobbying group trying to abolish it across the country. I'm based right here in Arlington, and my first question obviously is how did Gray 2K start, and why did you guys choose dog-racing as the target for your activism? Well, you know, we're problem solvers, and we saw a big problem here in Massachusetts back in the late 1990s. There were places, two places, that each had a thousand dogs living at small cages. They'd take them out every few days, race them in circles. Sometimes they'd die. Sometimes they'd suffer such terrible injuries they'd get put down. And then, after they were finished racing, some got adopted, some didn't. Nobody kept track of it. It was, it was, it was hell for these dogs. And we decided we'd do something about it. And when we formed the Gray 2K committee back in the late 1990s, our dream was to end dog-racing here in Massachusetts. But since that time, we've become a national organization, and then we graduated to international work. So, we have ended dog-racing in multiple states, and now we're working in places like China and Ireland and Australia, so we can combat the same problems. How did you begin the process of closing down race tracks, and how has that process evolved over the years if you got more and more successful? Yeah, well, thank you, Ross. It's, you know, like Christine said, we, you know, our work really, this effort really preceded us. There was really a movement to end gray-hunt racing, which is, you know, part of obviously a broader animal protection movement that has really been successful in pushing reforms across, you know, many aspects of our society over the past couple of decades. And I think, you know, Christine was doing local activism on this issue and other animal protection issues. I was originally from the West Coast and came here to work on an initial campaign in 2000 to end gray-hunt racing, which was a ballot question that lost 51-49. And, you know, we, so we were sort of thrown into this fight and inherited, you know, a movement and activism that had preceded us. And when we first engaged, we had no idea what we were doing. To be honest, I mean, we had a lot of energy and a lot of passion, but we didn't understand, you know, political activism and social justice activism, you know, other, you know, in any real way. And so I think the fight itself has taught us, I mean, over the last 20 years, it's been an incredible journey that's taken us around the world and back home again. And, you know, last November, we won this historic victory to end gray-hunt racing in Florida, shutting down 12 commercial racetracks, a victory that had been sought by the animal welfare community broadly for decades, generations. I mean, really, a landmark seminal victory for animal welfare in the history of the Western world. And so to start, you know, here in Massachusetts, not knowing what we were doing and go on that journey and come back and win Florida and be here with you today is really cool. It's still a little surprising, quite frankly, but, you know, we always, to answer your question more directly, we always found a way to stay grounded. We always found a way to stay true to who we are and our roots, but at the same time, we were forced to become good at this because we had a powerful opponent. And if we didn't find creative ways to fight for these dogs and not only make life better for the dogs and the industry completely, if we weren't constantly trying to get better and improve ourselves and be more creative and be more dogged, and we lost a lot, quite frankly. I mean, our biggest teacher was our defeats. And that forced us to take a step back and say, you know, what is a better way to fight for justice in this area? So, but yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I think we've, as Carrie has said, we made some mistakes along the way, but we were willing to make mistakes. We were willing to risk our reputation, such as it was, and push on. I think a lot of folks start out with great ideas. They get to, you know, they don't win the first time as we did not in 2000 in Massachusetts. And then they give up. And we saw no reason not to keep fighting. So when our grade 2K committee of 2000 folded after the near, near win, I like to say, we lost 51-49 on the ballot. We said, okay, well, dog racing should have ended by now in Massachusetts. Should have won that one. Now we're going to not just come back and win in Massachusetts. We're going to take this nationwide. We're going to close every dog track in every state until it's all over. And at that time we were just thinking about the United States, but now we're worldwide. I would also say that, you know, we've had some luck. So the perseverance was important, but luck really played a key role. One of the things we didn't have was a lawyer, and we couldn't afford a lawyer. We had no money whatsoever. So well, I drew the short straw and I went to law school. And I got a scholarship to go to law school so I could be our lawyer. Little did I know until the third year, four years at night that the scholarship I had won was paid for by the local, one of the local dog track owners. He happened to be the benefactor for the New England School of Law. And well, when I learned that I kept it to myself because I figured I had one more year to go and I better not say anything. So as it turned out, I graduated, got my degree, and when I let Mr. Carney of Rainham Park know that he had sent me to law school, he insisted on being at the graduation ceremony and giving me my diploma. So it's been a strange ride. And as you said, you guys are now international. How did that begin? How did you guys begin to stop the spread of dog race in other countries? Like I know you guys have done it for Jamaica and some other places and the Canadrome and Macau. How did that begin? Did you guys contact other organizations over there and that's how it started? Did you start to do work and then find the organizations? Well, I think it started at home. I mean, I'm getting a kick out of Brooklyn photo bombing us. Behind us is Brooklyn the rescued Greyhound from the Canadrome who's with us now even though he's a cancer survivor. He's struggling with osteosarcoma but so as we're doing the interview, Brooklyn's hopping behind us. But I mean, it started locally. I mean, we, you know, initially this was a local fight to end Greyhound racing in Massachusetts. And Christine was one of the central organizers of that fight. And I was doing similar legislative work as a citizen lobbyist in the state of Oregon. And when we took on this powerful industry, we used the Citizens Initiative process. We collected 150,000 signatures in less than 100 days with an all-volunteer effort which just really isn't done in that process today and put it on the ballot and lost 5149. And that was, you know, on one hand a crushing defeat but it also sent us a message that improved to us that, you know, it was possible to take on this powerful industry and win. I mean, that, you know, Greyhound racing had been an incredibly powerful special interest in Massachusetts and around the country. At one time, you know, Greyhound track owners in the Bay State were some of the most powerful political entities in the state legislature in any industry. I mean, they really were hand the state in a lot of ways. And so, you know, we formed a national nonprofit and said, well, if we care about Greyhounds in Massachusetts, we obviously care about Greyhounds all over the country. And, you know, we started, you know, trying to figure out ways to advocate for the dogs in the process and in the political process and be effective. And, you know, we gradually started to win and we borrowed a lot from other social justice movements. And we did come up with our own methodology, if you will, about how to do this. We started having success. We came back eight years later in Massachusetts, collected 150,000 signatures, again, with an all-volunteer effort, put it on the ballot in 2008, and had a sweeping victory where we carried 12 of 14 counties, you know, almost 300 of Massachusetts 351 cities and towns. I mean, we just won from one end of the state to the other. And that was a really powerful moment. But, you know, after that, we started to look and say, okay, if we care about Greyhounds in the United States, we obviously also care about Greyhound racing and the Greyhounds are suffering in Ireland and in Macau and in Australia. And so we started to reach out. And I mean, I think we've been at the center of this movement, but there's a huge movement underway to help these dogs and a huge movement underway to help animals generally. I mean, it's a really significant part of our time that I think is overlooked in many ways. But to be at the center of that and see it and see that our, in an age where things are so polarized and seem so corrupted, to see that our democracy can work and bring about change and justice. It's really empowering. And I think Christine and I both feel just incredibly fortunate that we've had the opportunity to do this work. And do you guys want to tell us a little bit about the dogs you have with us today, Gina and Brooklyn? Well, you might say that we bring our work home with us. Gina, who is the beautiful fawn asleep at the moment, is rescued from Florida. She raced at Derby Lane almost 200 times until she was rescued. And she's been with us for a few years. Now Brooklyn, he has just come to us this year. He was one of over 500 dogs that we rescued from a Chinese dog track called the Cannadrome. And this was an eight-year campaign. And Brooklyn was actually the poster child for the campaign, the inspiration. Our board member went over to Macau to investigate the track on our behalf. We had learned of this track just by reading about it in the paper. There was a story that said that over 400 dogs were shipped to this terrible track in Macau from Australia each year, and all of them were killed. There was no adoption program for any dog. As soon as the dog slowed down, became injured or too old, that dog was killed and replaced. So about 30 dogs would be shipped every month, 30 killed to make room for them. So she took pictures of several dogs, but this dog, Brooklyn, just spoke to me. And I said, I'm going to save that dog. That dog has really reached my heart. And eight years later, we were able to negotiate with the Chinese government to close down the track and release the dogs. So starting late last year, we had the Macau Airlift and 535 dogs were taken from that track. And we had a network of adoption groups around the world who received them in the United Kingdom, Europe. Most of them, over 300, were shipped right here to the United States. And they are happy and safe now for the first time in their lives. And Brooklyn here, he's such a charmer. I just can't really explain it, but everybody who meets him loves him. And I'm thrilled that he can be with us here today. He was, after everything he went through, after only a few weeks of being with us, he was diagnosed with bone cancer. So he's a survivor of that. Every day he just runs around, explores, and sees new things, and meets people, and he's just incredibly sweet. And yeah, it's one thing to view this as a fight against oppression and injustice. And it is for us. We feel very passionately about that, obviously. And we view it as directly relating to the other social justice fights of our time. But to go home and to be with Brooklyn every night and to take care of him every day and just love him selflessly is, it makes it real, but it's also just an incredible blessing. So we're really, really lucky to have him. Our cat's not so much. He's not a huge cat fan. Well, he's really taught us a lot that change is possible. When we discovered that this track even existed, which we did not know. It's on a peninsula, Macau, which is off mainland China, basically kind of like the Las Vegas of China. All the gambling happens there. It's not allowed on the mainland. So when I said to Kerry, I shouted across the room, I said, do you know about this track? 400 dogs are killed a year. We have to do something about this. And he said, Christine, how are we going to do something about a Chinese dog track sitting in a basement office in Massachusetts? And I said, I don't know, but we will. And it really has taught me that if you put your mind to it, you can make real change and to know that the result is to save this beautiful dog, I can't tell you how happy I am about our work and about how it's enriched my life. Well, and Ross, I want to tell you how great I am to be here with you today because in recent years we've familiarized ourselves with, we're both history nuts, but obviously with the history of Massachusetts, but the history of this area. And even though we've lived here for a long time, we moved our headquarters to Arlington just under a decade ago, and we really feel blessed to be here, to be down the road from where Bronson all caught and Thoreau and a lot of the abolition movement found support, there's no question that we are doing cutting edge work in this one particular area of activism and social justice. And one of our goals is to create a methodology that hopefully can apply to other justice fights as well, or at least have some contribution in that. And so to be in Massachusetts, we're so much of this work started and just the fights and the people who precede us, and it's just a welcoming community as well. Arlington, obviously when we were on the ballot, voted overwhelmingly to support Andy Greyhound Racing, and we're really honored to have our work be based here. We're growing tremendously as an organization, and so we're proud to be a part of the Arlington community. Let me just say, our goal is to put ourselves out of business. So we hope to be back on the show sometime and say, well, we're done. That's our goal. We want to be obsolete. We don't want this problem to be happening anymore. We want to solve the problem. That's our number one goal. Do you guys want to talk about some of the problems that come with dog racing? Sure. Like some of the biggest reasons that it needs to be pulled down? So our criticism of Greyhound Racing is not based on individuals. There are good people and bad people in this industry, just like in every industry. There clearly are individual acts of cruelty that happen in this industry. There's no doubt about that. But our criticism is that this industry essentially uses dogs as numbers to gamble on, and with that comes a constant pressure to secure the highest return, economic return, out of each dog while incurring the least amount of cost. And so what that leads to is a series of industry standard practices that are essentially cutting corners and are either suboptimal or absolutely terrible when it comes to animal welfare. So for example, in the United States, every racing Greyhound endures a life of confinement. The dogs are kept in rows of stacked metal cages that are barely large enough for the dogs to stand up or turn around for about 22 hours a day. They race half a dozen times or less per month. And so the vast majority of their life is spent in a cage. And there are these giant kennel compounds that are attached to each race track that has many of a thousand dogs living in just these windowless buildings with rows of stacked cages inside them. That's obviously not the way that we would treat our dog. A huge number of Greyhounds suffer serious injuries and die on the track. I mean, we're doing work right now in West Virginia, and over the last decade, more than 8,000 Greyhound injuries have been reported just to two race tracks in that state, including more than 3,000 dogs suffer broken bones, almost all of them broken legs, and more than 400 Greyhounds that died on the track. And so the injuries are just a persistent, constant problem. And similarly, there are serious drug problems in the Greyhound racing industry. Not only performance enhancing drugs, which definitely happens. We've seen dozens of Greyhounds tested positive for cocaine, opiates, but also all female Greyhounds are given an anabolic steroid called methyl testosterone, which is used to prevent them from coming into season and prevent a loss of race days. There's obviously a performance enhancing drug. It's terrible from an animal welfare perspective, and there's all sorts of known side effects. But the industry does it because these dogs are at the track for a short amount of time, and they don't want any disruption. And so giving regular shots of animal steroids to females is one way of preventing disruptions, which again is just crazy, just mind-blowing. And that actually is prohibited in a lot of dog racing jurisdictions overseas, but continues here. The food they're fed is what's called 4D meat, which is deemed, meat that's been deemed unfit for human consumption, essentially the animal has fallen or is sick and cannot go into the human food chain. The animal is still rendered, and it's sold to the Greyhound industry for pennies per pound. And again, that's used in all sorts of known health problems. There have been many cases of just entire kennels of racing Greyhounds falling ill, dogs dying, but they do it because they're trying to secure the highest return while just spending as little as possible. So it's, you know, the dogs are disposable. They're always putting the buck before the buck. I mean, there's just a cost-benefit analysis in place at all times, so the day will come when that dog loses and that dog's not worth keeping, and something's got to be done. And in the past, they were simply destroyed. Thankfully, since Greyhound racing has been exposed, Greyhound adoption has really flourished. We're so excited because just a couple weeks ago, one of the tracks we've been most concerned about, Southland and Arkansas, announced that following our victory in Florida, it saw the handwriting on the wall, and it was voluntarily phasing out dog racing there, and they would make a thousand dogs plus available for adoption. I mean, this is a new day in our campaign, so we don't even start the campaign and they say, okay, wait a minute, we know what's going to happen. Let's get these dogs out, let's do this the right way. And the wonderful thing about this is when a business makes its decision, the business then accounts for all those involved, so the attract employees are going to just be phased into new jobs at the facility, and it's a gigantic facility. Dog racing is only a small part of it, and in fact it's a losing part of it. Across the country, every state with dog racing is losing money on live racing because nobody's going to watch dogs run around in circles, and as a result, the track owners are often taking a bath, so they're actually looking for relief. In Florida, which is phasing out dog racing now, it must do so by December 2020. The track owners were losing a combined $35 million a year, so that's incentive. I mean, another thing that I think has been really amazing about this fight is it really is just so bipartisan, and to me, dogs are part of our lives. I mean, they're family members there, and the notion that you would keep a dog in a cage for 22 hours a day, the notion that you would give hundreds and hundreds of dogs in an anabolic steroid cause them to run around a track knowing many dogs are going to be seriously injured and die, so people gamble on them is really counter to just our basic values as Americans, almost like our sense of common sense and decency, and again, in an era when things are just so highly polarized, and so it seems like we're fighting over everything and can't grant anything. The Florida campaign, which I said in the media after we won Florida, I thought it was the most significant animal welfare victory to this point in the history of the western world, and I really believe that. I mean, it was just a huge moment with a 69% vote in a conservative state, where voters said this industry is going to be swept away and put into the history books because it was cruel and inhumane. This was a multi-billion-dollar industry at one time. I mean, at its peak in the early 1990s, there were almost 70 operational dog tracks in 19 states, more than three billion dollars bet. This was a massive industry at one point, and the Florida campaign had the most incredible support from both the right and the left, and we had Andrew Gillam, progressive icon and gubernatorial candidate, Sean Shaw, who is the Democratic Progressive Candidate for Attorney General, the League of Women Voters of Florida, the Florida Democratic Progressive Caucus, the Florida College Democrats, and Laura Trump and Matt Gates. The sitting governor, conservative governor, Rick Scott, who is now a U.S. Senator, there really is no other issue, I would argue, in today's time that unites people on the right and the left, and it really just comes down to, there still is some sense of shared community and shared values. I also think that once we educate people about what's happening to dogs and let them understand the economic impact of dog racing, these two prongs really reach both the Democrats and the Republicans that everyone in between. So maybe one isn't so concerned about how dogs are treated, oh, they're just dogs. Maybe the other is saying, well, economics is, wait a minute, the track owners are losing 35 million a year, and the state is losing over 3 million regulating it? I don't like that. So no matter what side of the aisle you're on, there's something wrong with dog racing, and we're happy to inform people about all the reasons why they should vote for the dogs. And to shift the conversation to something a little bit lighter. So you guys are married, and Great 2K is run by you guys. How is it beneficial to be a married couple who runs a non-profit? Well, I mean, look, I think we... Careful. We were not married when we formed Great 2K. We were both volunteers for the Great 2K committee. He came along in 2001. 2000. 2000. Okay. And I had been working on it for several years here locally. So he came over from Oregon, and he was this really smart guy who knew it. And it just turned out that after all was said and done, there were two of us left in the room who said, well, let's keep fighting. Yeah, we lost, but let's keep fighting. And all around us, people started to come back and say, yeah, we'll try again. Yes, we'll work with you. And it was so fulfilling and wonderful, but we weren't a couple. We were just really committed to the same thing, helping these dogs. And well, one thing led to another. And if you work in a small room for 12 hours a day, you're either going to love each other or hate each other. So we chose the former. No, it's Ross. It's just for me personally, I don't have a lot of the trappings in my life that a lot of people have. I mean, I don't have long-term financial security. I don't have, but to have these two beautiful dogs and an incredible wife who's the love of my life and four cats and work that means everything to me. And a really welcoming community is, I mean, I feel incredibly fortunate. Awesome. Is there anything else that Great 2K is doing on their big to-do list that you want people to look out for? Any way that people can get involved and stuff like that? We can always use office volunteers. And we're located right in Arlington Center. And this is our busiest time of year. So anyone who'd be interested in coming and pitching in, meaning Brooklyn and Gina, they come to work every day, love to have you. I just want to say how proud I am that we're located here personally and our headquarters located here. We want to make Arlington proud. We want to be a part of this community. And we want to be something that everyone in the town can say, this is another reason why this is such a great place to live. Okay. And that just about wraps us up. This has been Ross Federa from ACMI with Driving Forces and Carrie and Christine from Great 2K USA Worldwide, based right here in Arlington. And check in for our next episode to see what our community can do for you.