ON the day NSW killed its greyhound racing industry Jason Mackay, one of the state’s top trainers, took a call at his Richmond Vale property.
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It was Martin Hallinan, one of the state’s top greyhound owners. He’d got word of what Premier Mike Baird was about to announce.
“It was like Martin had had a car accident,” Mr Mackay said on Friday.
“I tried to find my wife and kids. I couldn’t speak.”
Mr Baird’s decision to dismantle the sport on the strength of a Special Commission’s report into “widespread cruelty” has upended the lives of Jason and Rechelle Mackay and their three daughters.
The trainer of multiple greyhounds of the year said he stayed up Thursday night, “absolutely wrecked”, pacing the house.
No one knows when or if his kennel of 30 dogs will add to its haul of prize money. If the ban remains, the trainer is resigned to losing the dogs interstate. They haven’t stopped needing food, shelter or training.
“The dogs don’t know, they don’t read the paper. Looking after them is seven days a week, 16 hours a day,” Mr Mackay said.
“Everything you do for them is by 30.”
Past a dormant dog-walking machine – a sort of treadmill divided into four lanes – the stalls in Mr Mackay’s barn-sized kennel smell of straw.
Each stall has a bed with a quilt – leopard print, zebra – and a greyhound. The dogs’ names are in black marker; Zac, Ethan, Scarlett.
Scarlett’s coat is shiny in a way suggestive of black metal. She peers out sidelong and offers a bright eye. Her racing name is Veetee Swift.
“One of the fastest greyhounds to race,” Mr Mackay said, pointing out another dog named Buddy that had fetched $21,000 as a pup.
Jason Mackay is the son of greyhound trainers who warned their boy “as a real young bloke” not to keep disappearing in the kennels.
A frantic search one day found him asleep in a stall, curled around a black greyhound.
The Mackays’ single-storey brick home has a heated den with a bar and walls of memorabilia. There are news clippings with headlines like “Hail King Jason”.
Letters on a magnetic whiteboard spell “NEVER GIVE UP”. Mr Mackay’s favourite piece is a mounted photo of a greyhound uncoiling mid-air.
“Texas Gold. He’ll go down maybe as a hall of famer,” he said.
“He got the crowds in at [Sydney greyhound Mecca] Wentworth Park, because he’d drop out and let them go. They’d go lengths in front and he’d zip over the top of them.”
The dogs’ winnings have funded work on the house over 30 years. If the winnings dry up, Mr Mackay said, the house goes. What he has built with greyhounds is intended for Summah, 13, 11-year-old April and Rose, five.
Among the Special Commission’s findings was that between 48,000 and 68,000 of the greyhounds bred in NSW in the past 12 years had been killed because they were deemed too slow.
Mr Baird noted that it would be intolerable for even a fraction of that killing rate to continue, but Mr Mackay said the 20,000-dog discrepancy showed the figures were rubbery.
The trainer denied the Premier’s claim that his craft is out of step with society, its champions on the wrong side of history.
“The bad eggs; you’ve got to be dirty on them. Deal with the dirty ones, like Victoria and Queensland [have],” Mr Mackay said.
“But to have to tell my daughters this might be over tears the guts out of me. We’re not going to take this lying down.”
