Hound on the hearthrug

I HAD gone through life man and boy, without ever meeting a greyhound, until once, cycling through the Limerick countryside at dusk, I whizzed round a bend to find four or five of the animals fanned out, on dainty tippy toes, on their leads.

Straightening a desperate swerve and calming down again, I replayed the image of bicycle shaped dogs with muscles moving like machine parts, yet also with a presence, a warm and lively sort of innocence, that registered even, as it were, in passing. So these were the robodogs of glittering nights in Shelbourne Park, the ravening coursing hounds of The Irish Times's long lenses creatures of other worlds and sub cultures to which I had never been drawn.

I'm looking now at other sorts of picture. Here's "Fawnie" lying sleek and composed among blue bells under trees, eminently strokable and quite changed from the abandoned, nervous wreck picked up in a church foyer in Limerick. Here's "Shadow", black as velvet, white chest and raspberry tongue, sprawling amiably on somebody's lawn, and the other pictures of her in a cage, half starved and hairless with mange. And "Demi", who was tied to a gravestone with baler wire and left to die, and who now, while back to herself physically, still can't look a human being or even a camera in the eye.

I'm being lobbied, of course, as someone salt on animals. There's usually a line to be drawn between cruelty talk and ecological affairs, but yes, I do talk to Meg rather mare than I should, and can quite see that greyhounds, no less than mongrel corgis, might like to grow old in human company.

That most people rarely think of greyhounds as pets is cultural conditioning, just as we learn to distance ourselves from animals earmarked for food. To those not actually engaged in their rearing and racing, greyhounds can seem to be mere gambling accessories, or a rather rattish and specialised animal export.

Some 11,000 dogs enter and leave greyhound racing in Ireland every year, but how many are granted retirement when they start to slow dawn, or get injured? On crude reckoning, there ought to be about 100,000 aging greyhounds in Ireland, but it appears they can be very hard to find.

Donal MacIntyre, the BBC reporter who exposed the practices of "blooding" young greyhounds in Ireland a couple of years ago, has concluded that a lot at the 100,000 meet a very sorry end. They are mostly put down, some are abandoned some are drowned at bludgeoned by owners not willing to pay vet fees, some go for vivisection and some 400 go to Spain for racing every year. Very few are kept as pets.

Abandoned ex-racers, of all ages and sometimes in bad physical condition, have been picked up by the ISPCA, especially in the neighbourhood of dog tracks. Both Britain and America have well organised voluntary homing schemes, and now a small group of people, working closely with Marian Fitzgibbon of the ISPCA, have formed Greyhound Friends of Ireland to try to do the same. They already have about a dozen animals in their care.

The Retired Greyhound Trusts in England has homed over 12,000 dogs since 1975, a task made much easier by explaining that two 20 minute walks a day are quite enough exercise, as for other dogs. "Greyhounds are basically idle," it insists, and extremely well behaved on a lead. They like children and old people I'm not sure about cats.

Greyhound Friends of Ireland feel, reasonably enough, that the greyhound industry itself should want to help in setting up a retirement sanctuary if only, as with farming and blood stock as part of a "quality" export image. Bord na gCon, the State's greyhound agency, seems, however, not to see any problem the wider racing and race going community may be more open to appeal.

The contact for the Friends is Ms Melanie Sharpe Bolster at Glenlohane, Kanturk, Co Cork. (Tel 029 50014 Fax 029 51100).

THE spell of crisp spring weather has me fretting to sample a few kilometres of two new walking guides.

Michael Fewer's Way marked Trails of Ireland (Gill & Macmillan paperback, £9.99) will be the standard guide to the best of the 1,500 km of way marked trails in, the Republic that are approved and monitored by Cospoir, the National Sports Council. There was nothing to stop us walking the countryside before, of course, but, somehow, knowing we won't get lost between A and B, and having, a path created for us here and there, can make it all the more inviting.

How delightful it would have been, lately, to follow the Grand Canal Way, for example, in Michael Fewer's company, and discover the midlands breaking" into leaf and bird song. This is a good time for the Leitrim Way, too all those willows, fresh hawthorn and banks of dazzling whins or the Barrow Way, dawn the river from Robertstown to New Ross. These are three less obvious choices, along with the more dramatic trails in the hills of Munster and the west.

Michael Fewer is a Dublin architect with an instinct for sensing where a walker might to go wrong, and for coming up with satisfying morsels of local knowledge, including pointers to reliable B&Bs and pubs.

Hill Walkers' Connemara and Mayo is from David Herman's experienced hand and offers 34 western walks, high up and low dawn. He doesn't glamourise any of them unduly. Nephin, Connacht's second highest mountain, "has been derided as one of the dullest in Ireland. A vast, unshapely mount, its abundance of quantity does not quite compensate for its lack of quality".

Among words which should exist. David Herman offers "slogarie" "The stretch of concealed rough moor land which lies between what you thought was the top at the hill and what actually is . His guide is puhlished by Shanksmare Publications, 41 Meadow Grove, Dublin 16.