AI tool spotlights welfare concerns in greyhound racing industry

University of Melbourne researchers have uncovered several animal welfare issues in the United Kingdom’s greyhound racing industry, reigniting public debate about whether the sport should be banned worldwide. 

Published today in Frontiers in Animal Welfare and Policy, researchers have for the first time used AI agents to compile data on 31,028 licensed greyhounds that ran in more than 1.26 million race starts in the UK between January 2022 and March 2026. 

Lead researcher and animal welfare scientist Dr Mia Cobb, from the Melbourne Veterinary School, said the AI tool surfaced concerning information buried in publicly accessible online registries. 

“The UK greyhound racing industry describes itself as transparent and publishes some annual welfare figures publicly, however the data doesn’t offer real visibility about what it’s like to be a greyhound,” Dr Cobb said. 

Using agentic AI – software that performs repetitive tasks under continuous human supervision – Dr Cobb combined information from several public websites to uncover animal welfare insights at a scale and speed that would have taken a team of researchers months. 

“We first noticed the industry reported a stable rate of on-track fatalities when the number of deaths were rising and race numbers were falling, which didn’t make sense,” Dr Cobb said.  

“Subsequent analysis revealed that the on-track fatality rate for racing greyhounds had actually increased by 30 per cent between 2022 and 2024.  

“By rounding fatality rates to two decimal places, the regulator’s reporting over the past three years concealed the fact that more dogs were dying even as race starts declined. 

“The UK’s greyhound welfare strategy cannot claim improved canine safety, with more than two dogs dying on-track every week since its introduction in 2022. This led us to use AI agents to explore what else was going on.” 

Co-researcher and deputy director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, Dr Simon Coghlan, believes these reported fatalities are only the tip of the iceberg as public registries don’t disclose post-race deaths caused by injuries sustained while racing. 

“Our research highlights a major visibility issue,” Dr Coghlan said.  

“There is no public registry that accounts for individual dogs’ post racing welfare, however we know the Greyhound Board of Great Britain holds unpublished data on retirement destinations, career-ending reasons, as well as individual-level injury and euthanasia figures linked to specific racetracks. 

“Restricting access to this information allows the industry to go unchecked regarding its accountability to animal welfare claims.”  

The results also revealed the high turnover of greyhounds has not changed, with around 40 per cent of racing dogs stopping every year. 

“The industry maintains racing despite this turnover through a steady supply of new greyhounds from Ireland, making up 85 per cent of greyhounds running in the UK – nearly half of those bred annually in the Republic of Ireland,” Dr Cobb said. 

The researchers also discovered the rate at which greyhounds encounter harmful events while racing at different locations. 

“We found that the typical greyhound races for less than a year and that some tracks have higher rates of incidents like crashes and falls,” said Dr Cobb.  

“This detail has not been disclosed by the regulator, even when pressed by the Welsh parliamentary committee debating a ban.” 

Earlier this year, Scotland and Wales announced plans to ban or phase-out greyhound racing. New Zealand initially announced plans to phase out the sport in December 2024, with racing set to be prohibited by July 31 this year. 

In Australia, the sport is already prohibited in the ACT, while Tasmania plans to phase it out by mid-2029. South Australia’s industry faces a July 2026 reform deadline, or the prospect of a state-wide ban, and Western Australia's parliament is conducting a formal inquiry. 

RSPCA Australia Chief Science Officer, Dr Suzie Fowler, said the Australian greyhound industry has long been plagued by animal welfare issues including overbreeding, inadequate living standards, high risk of injuries and death, and a lack of transparency regarding the fate of dogs after retirement. 

“For decades the RSPCA has called for many industries, including the greyhound racing, to improve their transparency and provide more publicly available and visible data regarding animal welfare outcomes,” Dr Fowler said. 

“This new methodology does the heavy lifting of compiling data that would otherwise take a team months to complete, but we must remember, it is still only as helpful as the data made publicly available by industry.  

“Tools like this will help identify key animal welfare concerns and opportunities for improvements by industry and government bodies and could be used to assess effectiveness of changes to improve welfare.”  

The researchers hope their study will influence policy makers reviewing greyhound racing regulation globally. 

“Industry transparency should mean genuinely showing the public how dogs are doing. This research shows that disclosure does not necessarily produce visibility. We hope the greater visibility the AI agents offered will enable better accountability to meet public expectations,” Dr Cobb said. 

“I hope the novel research method we used can be applied more widely by other researchers, regulators, welfare scientists or journalists exploring other animal-reliant industries with publicly available data so we can all be informed about how our decisions impact animals.” 

Read the full research paper published in Frontiers in Animal Welfare and Policy.