More Stuff About My Brother, the Greyhound

First of all, I will tell you that I am starting to like Nicky, and I don't growl at him anymore.  Mom says I am a very good girl for not growling.  Last night when it was bedtime, I went in the bedroom, and Nick was in the dog bed where I usually sleep, so after thinking about what I should do, I finally squeezed myself onto the edge of the bed next to him.

So that's how I slept until Nicky got up later and wanted to go outside and potty.  And Mom got up and let all the boy dogs outside, but I stayed in bed, and in fact I moved to the middle of the dog bed.  And then when Nicky came back, I growled at him and told him to go sleep on one of the other beds.  Which he did, and without talking back or anything.

Anyway, I asked Nick if he wanted to write the entire history of his life in a blog entry, but he said he was kind of too shy to do that, but maybe he would write an entry later sometime.  He said he didn't mind if I wrote about him in my blog, though, so I will tell you everything we know about him from his past records that we got from REGAP.

Nicky was born in Kansas on July 20, 2004, and his registered name is PB's Dodgedabone.  I think this is a very strange name because it sounds like someone was throwing bones at Nick, and he had to dodge them.  But when you look at Nick's sire's name, you see that it was Dodgem by Design, and his dam was named Runtodabone.  And if you kind of mix those names together, you could maybe come up with Dodgedabone.  But while I am at it, I will also say that Runtodabone is kind of an icky name because it sounds like you are going to run so hard and so far that all your skin wears away down to the bone.

Well, so after Nicky got to whatever age it is when greyhounds start racing, he ran in four races at The Woodlands, which was a track in Kansas City, Kansas that closed a couple of years ago because they were not making money.  And they weren't making money because lots of people decided they liked going to casinos to gamble instead of going to the track.  Which was good for the greyhounds because they didn't have to race there anymore or live in cages and other bad conditions.  Except that there are still a bunch of dog-racing tracks in this country in places like Florida.


Anyway, like I said, Nicky ran in four races, but these were not real races where people could bet on the dogs and win money.  These were "schooling" races, which we think must be just for training.  We don't know how many dogs were in each race, but in the first one, Nicky came in 4th, and the comments were "poor effort, inside."  Then in the second race, he was 5th, and the comments were "never rallied, inside."  In the 3rd race he was also 5th, and it says "chased field, mid."  Then in the last race, where he finished 5th again, he was "bumped early, mid."

So I think what all this means is that PB's Dodgedabone was not meant to be a race dog because he was not very good at racing.  Which is why he was retired at an early age, and he went to a rescue group called Pups Without Partners, where he was neutered.  And after that, some people adopted him and named him Gator.  These people had him until last April, and then they gave him to REGAP, along with a girl greyhound.  I don't know what the girl's name was before, but REGAP called the two of them Nicholas and Nadine.  At first everyone thought the two of them needed to be together, but later they decided that the dogs would be okay apart.  So the foster mom adopted Nadine, and now we have adopted Nicholas.

Whew!  That was a pretty long history, so it's no wonder that Nicky made me write it instead of writing it himself.  Anyway, I am just going to tell you a couple of things about greyhounds, and then I am going to quit writing.

For a long, long time, people thought that greyhounds dated back to ancient Egypt, and that they were related to the salukis (which are also called Persian greyhounds) or to sloughis (Arabian greyhounds).  But after the scientists figured out how to understand doggy DNA, they realized that greyhounds are not related to salukis or sloughis at all.  Instead, greyhounds are related to herding dogs!  I think a lot of people were shocked to learn this.  I know that I was, because it seems to me like all the tall, skinny, fast dogs would be related.

Our whole doggy family!

And of course, you may be wondering why greyhounds have that name when most of them aren't even gray.  And the answer is that nobody knows for sure!  The word greyhound probably came from the Old English word grighund.  But it's kind of a mystery what grig meant in Old English or Old Norse.  The best guess is that it meant something like "fair" or "shining."  So now whenever you see a greyhound, you can just think of it as being a dog that's all shiny and fair.