Saturday, May 31, 2014
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| Our cute foster boy Havoc (Thrilling Havoc) celebrating with his toys :) |
We have just heard the most amazing news, which we wished for and prayed for years now! Official announcement from Greyhound Racing NZ (GRNZ) is here:
http://www.thedogs.co.nz/News.aspx?NewsID=1134
This is amazing - incredible for the retired dogs!
I was told by many greyhound lovers that this blog has helped to achieve this, by sharing information, and publishing documents, as well as analyzing data published by GAP. In my opinion, we really did not do much except publish a few blog posts over the years - the bulk of the work to achieve this was done by you, greyhound lovers from all sides and from all over NZ: trainers who complained over the years, volunteers, fired/resigned ex-GAP staff who spoke up, staff who took GAP to Employment Tribunal and won, people still in GAP who wanted to help the cause and sent us information anonymously, and many many others. Well done to all of you - you have achieved what seemed impossible! It is truly humbling to see what people can achieve when they come together and speak up!
Back to the announcement above - I have written about recent Karapiro kennels resignation from GAP NZ in my post from last week, which included an email from Karapiro kennel managers as well:
http://greyhoundsnz.blogspot.co.nz/2014/05/a-long-avaited-blog-post-please-share.html
It is wonderful that GRNZ jumped in and saved the day, and made sure that the retired dogs did not lose this retirement kennel (despite Karapiro's forced resignation from GAP, due to hopeless GAP management - for more detaisl, please refer to my post on the link above).
I have never been to Karapiro kennels, I don't know the owners nor staff there, I have never met them. I did hear very good things about them though, mainly from greyhound trainers from Waikato and the north.
We at Nightrave congratulate Karapiro on their new contract with Greyhound Racing NZ (GRNZ) and we wish them all the best in their future work. We congratulate GRNZ too - and we thank them from the bottom of our hearts: THANK YOU THANK YOU!
In the coming weeks and months, we will be watching and investigating whether this means the funding of GAP NZ is going to be appropriately reduced by GRNZ, as now they are not the only industry-funded rehoming programme (wow, it is so wonderful to finally be able to write this!!!). We would expect some of the industry funds diverted from GAP to the Karapiro rehoming programme.
And no, we at Nightrave will never and have never asked for funds from GRNZ nor do we expect any from them - we do home some retired racers ourselves, privately, when they have nowhere else to go due to GAPs waiting list being 8 months long, however, we are not a rehoming organization and we are not aspiring to be.
We finance our limited rehoming of retired racers this way:
- trainers who ask us to home their dogs help us with food and funds, as well as with desexing of dogs they send to us to be rehomed
- we use proceeds from our online shop (www.nightrave.co.nz ) for promoting our greyhounds and their breed as competition dogs at obedience shows (dog show entry fees, private training lessons with top trainers in NZ, travel costs to dog shows all over NZ etc), as well as to assist with rehoming costs for those retired greyhounds who are entrusted to us to rehome into responsible pet homes
We are all for helping retired racers and offering them the best retirement options, but as discussed in our post from last week, we believe that funds need to be used appropriately and transparently by all rehoming organizations financed by the industry (including GAP), and accounts made transparent and detailed, as well as released to every donor, to every staff member and to every volunteer.
We do hope that GRNZ will take an appropriate course of action when it comes to distributing the funds allocated for grants to rehoming organizations. As is common in practice, in the future, funds should be allocated as per organizations' performance and statistics. And diversification of investment is the key - GRNZ should devide their 'rehoming fund' between a number of rehoming organizations, according to each organization's performance and stats, ensuring the best distributed investment in retired dogs' future. As we all know - it is never good throwing good money after bad.
We believe this actually is the best for GAP itself (and its founding mission), as well as for the dogs who come into GAP programme in the future. GAP will hopefully regroup, move on and reorganize itself (primarily by reorganizing their management staff and the Board). The new GAP should use this opportunity to improve, deal with staff and people management issues, allocate funds better, reduce entertainment and travel expenses for staff, do a review of their management practices and concentrate on homing retired dogs instead of fundraising for the lifestyle of a few people and for topping up the GAP Trust account. A good way to start would be by releasing the entire accounts for the last three years, free to public, via Charities Commission, and then work on fixing the issues.
As always, transparency is the key. So as always, we support our friends who are still in GAP and want to work towards this goal, in the new reorganized GAP. We wish them all the best in their quest.
Update 01/06/2014:
One of the readers just reminded me about the comments - I apologize, I completely forgot in all this excitement celebrating these amazing news!
As in the previous post, I have enabled anonymous comments on this blog, so if you would like to say anything without revealing your identity, you can simply comment anonymously in the comment box on this post. To see comments already posted, just click on 'comments' link under the title of this post.
Any GAP staff or volunteers are of course welcome to contact us, either anonymously or not. Some of GAP personnel/volunteers have been in touch already - we value your input, we were in GAP once too, and we know many of you have only the dogs' best interests at heart. We support you, we appreciate what you do and we are behind you.
If you would like to send us anonymous emails/documents etc, there are many online services which will enable you to do this (just google). Some of them are listed here: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/anonymous-email-providers/
Our email address is nightravegreys@gmail.com , or my personal one, favdich@yahoo.co.nz
And thank you again for all of you who have already done it.
2 comments:
Wonderful news. You & Rachel & others are to thank for this.
What fantastic news! My partner and me have been GAP volunteers in Auckland and Northland region for almost two years. We and our fellow volunteers read your website posts all the time, despite being told not to by some GAP staff! Naturally, the moment we were told this we went and found your website and read everything! We are here for the dogs -for their welfare and as you say best options for dogs coming out of racing. A number of GAP volunteers from Auckland do not support GAP Management any more (including me and hubby), and are going to contact Karapiro in order to get involved. kepp us the good work and I hope to meet you and your team one day!
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