TV REVIEW : Greyhounds’ Bleak Fate: ‘Running for Their Lives’

You admire them, you mourn them. “Greyhounds: Running for Their Lives” is at once a celebration of a magnificent animal and a heartbreaking eulogy.

The stirring “National Geographic Explorer” documentary airs at 6 p.m. Sunday on cable’s TBS network, with producer Eitan Weinreich using state-of-the-art photography to monitor the grace and athleticism of these sleek racing dogs--and home video footage to reveal the horrors that await many of them once their racing careers are aborted.

Bred to race for the pleasure of humans, greyhounds are the swiftest of dogs and among the most short-lived. They can run up to 45 m.p.h. Those that run only 44 m.p.h. are considered expendable by the racing industry, and most will lose their lives, many agonizingly.

A greyhound can be washed up as a racer at age 3, and there are only a few pet adoption programs that accept them once they’ve stopped running. An estimated 40,000 greyhounds are killed annually in this nation, according to U.S. Humane Society statistics cited by the program. The racing industry disputes that figure but not that the number of deaths are substantial. We hear “culling,” “destroying” and “putting to sleep” used in conjunction with greyhounds, all euphemisms for killing.

In one devastating sequence, we see the last moments of a “retired” greyhound at an animal control center where young, healthy greyhounds are killed “on an industrial scale.” It’s put to death by injection, then thrown onto a dump truck, atop a heap of other greyhound carcasses.

At least this animal is killed humanely. Much more jolting is footage of a dog farm in Ocala, Fla., where starving greyhounds near death, their skin stretched across protruding ribs, are crammed three to a cage.

Weinreich skillfully threads the hour with the story of Amazon, a young greyhound with a lackluster racing career whose fate may depend on how well she does in a final race. The producer waits until the end of the program to let viewers know whether Amazon will be spared or will join the overwhelming majority of former racers who are put to death at an early age.