Greyhound Racing Victoria CEO Alan Clayton believes people involved in greyhound racing can be confident about the sport’s future.

“We have over 1600 trainers, 400 breeders and 9,000 plus registered owners (in the Victorian greyhound racing industry) and the vast majority are good, honest people who are doing the right thing,” Clayton told SEN’s Mark Allen on Thursday.

“We’ve put in place a really strong and professional integrity capability, and hopefully after the turbulence of the last 12-18 months participants are now getting confident about the industry’s future.”

Clayton said integrity and animal welfare are at the centre of GRV’s reform program.

“We’ve more than doubled our integrity budget, we’ve substantially strengthened our steward function, we’ve had a 600% increase in our investigative capability, we had an external review by ex-Victorian police people to look at our intelligence gathering capability and we established a professional risk-based intelligence capability.”

“We’ve tripled our swabbing and we’ve got mechanisms to allow people to anonymously report suspicious behaviour and we’ve provided advice to participants about feeding guidelines for their dogs so they can avoid a non-intentional introduction of prohibited substances into the food of their dogs,” Clayton explained.

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