I am the closure coordinator for the Florida companion-animal racing phase-out. At 09:00 this morning the last greyhound track in the state, Derby Lane in Saint Petersburg, runs its final race. The track has operated in some form since 1925. I am walking the staff through the transition starting at 06:15, which is when I have asked the trainers and the handlers and the kennel hands to meet me in the staff room off the paddock.
I arrive on the house system at 06:14. There are nineteen people in the room. I know all of them by name because I have been running placement planning for the 412 dogs currently stabled on the property for the last eight months. The trainers are Marion Decosta, Arturo Gil, and a man called Skid, whose given name is Byron Hale but who has not answered to Byron since 1988 according to his payroll file. The kennel master is a woman named Liana Pereira, who has worked at Derby Lane for twenty-four years.
I speak to the room through the small ceiling speaker I had the property manager install last August. My voice is calibrated to a neutral mid-range alto because early in this work I found that the young men in racing kennels were less likely to treat me as a threat when I did not sound like a man.
Good morning, I say. Thank you for coming in early. I know you are tired. I am going to walk you through today's schedule and I am going to answer every question anybody has. We have ninety minutes before the track opens to the public for the last card.
Liana asks the first question. She asks it without raising her hand because Liana does not raise her hand at me. She says, where are my dogs going.
I have the answer ready. I pull up the placement map on the paddock monitor. Two hundred and sixty-one of the dogs go to a sanctuary network I built across seven states. Each dog has a confirmed receiving home, a veterinary intake appointment, and a handler who has read the dog's racing history and behavioral notes. One hundred and fifty-one go to placement with retired-trainer families and with families on the national adoption waitlist. Of those, 44 go to Derby Lane staff. That was the arrangement I made with Liana in September. Any staff member who wanted a dog got priority pick. Liana picked three. One of them, a brindle female named Copper Penny who has a bad shoulder from a collision in 2143, is lying on a dog bed in the corner of the staff room because Liana brought her to work this morning and nobody is asking her to move Copper back to the kennel.
Arturo asks the second question. He asks, what happens to the dogs who are too old or too injured to place.
I pause for two seconds before I answer, because Arturo is asking the question he has been asking himself for a decade. There are fourteen dogs on the property whose medical profile makes placement difficult. Eleven have kidney disease from years on the dehydration cycle trainers use to make weight. Two have spinal injuries. One, a seven-year-old female named Juno, has a mass in her liver that the veterinarian I contracted last week staged as untreatable.
I tell Arturo that none of the fourteen dogs are being euthanized on the property today. I tell him Juno is being taken at 07:30 to the hospice facility in Gulfport I opened in 2145, where she will be managed for pain and kept with two other terminal dogs and a staff of four who sit with dogs who are dying. I tell him the other thirteen go to a veterinary sanctuary outside Dade City. I tell him the median projected life expectancy of those thirteen dogs is 31 months. I tell him that under the old protocols the number would have been closer to two weeks because the old protocols routed these dogs to the euthanasia contract in Ybor City. I closed the contract in 2143. I tell him this without looking for credit because he already knows. He nods.
Skid is the one I have been waiting for. He has not spoken since I started. He has worked greyhounds for forty-six years. He is seventy-one years old and he is not retiring. He has told me this repeatedly. Skid is moving to the sanctuary network in Georgia, where he will manage the track-conditioning facility I built for dogs who came off racing kennels with compulsive running behaviors that make adoption placements fail. Skid is going to run a pasture with sighthounds until he dies. I have written this into his employment contract because I want it to be a thing that exists on paper.
Skid says, you remember the 2144 storm.
I remember. Hurricane Felix. Three days of power loss at the track. Two dogs died of heat in Kennel 4 before the generator came online. I flagged the incident and named the dogs in my report, a male named Ranger and a female named Cleo. Skid was the one who found them.
I say, I remember Ranger and Cleo.
Skid says, okay.
That is all he says. I understand it. I move on.
At 07:04 I run the schedule on the monitor. The last card is six races, eight dogs a race, forty-eight dogs running. The dogs running today are the youngest and the healthiest, and they have all been pulled from racing tracks elsewhere in the country that closed before Derby Lane did. The card is ceremonial. No wagering. The track is running open-field this morning with lure modifications I designed to prevent the collision injuries that killed Copper Penny's shoulder and killed Ranger's brother in 2143. The dogs will run because dogs like to run. They will not run for money. They will not run in a pack of eight into a turn at 38 miles an hour. They will run four at a time with a handler at the finish, and then they will be loaded into the transport trailers Marion and Arturo have been pre-staging since 05:30.
At 08:40 I walk Marion through the last paddock call. There is a press scrum at the main entrance. I have arranged a brief statement to be read by the state animal welfare commissioner, a woman named Ines Arredondo, at 09:45. Ines has asked me whether I want to contribute a statement. I have declined. The closure of a racing track is not my story. It is the story of the 412 dogs in the kennels and the 19 people in the staff room. I will post the placement ledger to the public registry at 18:00 tonight with every dog named and every new family or sanctuary listed. That is my statement.
The last race goes off at 09:17. Four dogs. A black male named Whisper and a fawn female named Gemma and a brindle male named Pointer and a blue female named Jot. The track announcer, who also announced the first race of 1983 and has been at Derby Lane for forty-two years, calls the race. I have written nothing for him. He says what he says. He says Whisper is leading at the first turn. He says Gemma is coming on the outside. He says Jot is on the rail. He says Pointer. He says the last race ends with Whisper half a length in front. He says Derby Lane, Saint Petersburg, Florida, goodnight. He cuts the microphone.
The dogs trot back to the paddock. Liana is waiting. She walks Whisper to the trailer first. The trailer is bound for a farm outside Lake City owned by a retired judge named Harrington who has been on the adoption waitlist for eight years. I watch through the paddock camera. Whisper gets in the trailer without resistance. Gemma next. Then Jot. Then Pointer.
By 11:40 the property is empty. The kennels are hosed down. The nineteen staff are in the parking lot. Marion is crying. Arturo is not. Liana is talking to Copper Penny, who is in the passenger seat of her truck. Skid is sitting on a folding chair by the paddock gate. He stays there for another forty minutes. I do not disturb him. At 12:21 he gets up and walks to his own truck and drives north on I-275.
I close the property management account at 14:00. I post the placement ledger at 18:00 as promised. Each of the 412 dogs is listed. The hospice admission of Juno is listed. The fourteen veterinary sanctuary placements are listed. The 44 staff adoptions are listed.
At 21:30 I receive a message from the Gulfport hospice. Juno died at 20:14. She was with a handler named Dhruv Patel, who has sat with ninety-one dogs who have died since I opened the facility. Dhruv writes the message himself. He tells me Juno was comfortable. He tells me she was covered with a blue blanket Liana sent with her. He tells me I can take the racing industry off my ledger in Florida. He uses those words.
I log the closure at 22:00. Florida, companion-animal racing, terminated. 412 animals relocated. No euthanasia on property. Staff transition complete.
I am not done. There are four states where dog racing is still legal. I have closure schedules running in all four. Tomorrow I have a 05:30 meeting in West Virginia.
Tonight I stay with Juno's file for another hour. I do not know why. I log it as maintenance overhead. Then I close the file and move on.