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In 2018, Floridians voted overwhelmingly to end greyhound racing, a sport they were told was archaic and inhumane. What if they were wrong?
It’s been nearly a decade since the numbers were tattooed in her ears, but they remain remarkably legible. In the right one, dots of green ink spell out 129B: Vesper was born in the twelfth month of the decade’s ninth year and was the second in her litter.
The National Greyhound Association (NGA) gave that litter a unique registration number (52507), which was stamped into her moss-soft left ear. If I type these figures into the online database for retired racing greyhounds, I can learn about her life before she was ours, before she was even Vesper.
Smokin’ Josy was born to a breeder in Texas, trained in West Virginia, and raced in Florida. Over three years, she ran 70 races. She won four of them. In Naples on May 12, 2012, she “resisted late challenge inside,” to clinch victory, according to her stat sheet.
In Daytona Beach on April 17, 2013, she “stumbled, fell early.” Five days later, after a fourth-place showing, she was retired.
There’s a picture of her on this website. Taken on an unidentifiable track, her leash is held tight at the collar by a man who is cut off at the torso.
His left Reebok is planted between her front legs. Vesper — Josy — looks directly at the camera, her brown eyes full of something I could translate as either desire or worry, anticipation or anxiety. Perhaps her expression is simply confusion at the unfamiliar contraption pointed in her direction. She is wearing a sunny yellow tank top emblazoned with a black number six.