Your Greyhound's History

A good place to start is Greyhound Data. There are details of over 1.6m greyhound pedigrees that go back to the 1800s, and over 2.5m greyhound racing results; you can search races by name, stadia, time period, etc., and for dogs by colour, sex, age, and tattoos, and get statistics; the explanations below on how to read your dog's pedigree and race history are based on it.

Your dog's racing name this is the best thing to search on if you know it. If not the next best method is by their ear tattoos (our page on tattoos gives information about Irish and UK ear marks). This should mean you get straight to your dog and their pedigree and history. However the database does not have every dog, particularly if, like Monty, they never actually raced, and there are some errors, so double check – if it looks wrong check you have spelt the name and/or read the tattoos correctly; it's easy to make a mistake with tattoos (when Hooch came to stay we were told he was Rathoneen Dan, VX–HXI; he turned out to be Bankers Wish, VX–NXI). And there are dogs that have the same ear‐marks, so if you are absolutely sure you have the right marks but get the wrong dog either the database contains an error or one of the dogs is a ringer (for example, Troy appears to share his ear marks with Banbury Slippy).

If your dog raced in the Republic of Ireland, another source of data is the Irish Greyhound Board – Bord na gCon; a commercial semi‐state body responsible for the control and development of the greyhound industry in the Republic of Ireland. On their site you can search dogs by name to get details of the dog, its pedigree and litters, and search on races going back to around 1998.