News of these local cruel practices add weight to the statistics from the industry itself during the Special Commission of Inquiry’s first public hearing last week.

The inquiry heard sworn evidence that as many as 17,000 greyhounds are killed in Australia each year because they are too slow. And before the practice of live baiting was recently exposed, up to nine in 10 trainers were using animals such as rabbits and piglets to “blood” their dogs. 

“The industry is responsible for the unnecessary deaths of anywhere between 13,000 and 17,000 young greyhounds every year,” Greyhounds Australasia wrote in an internal memo this year that was read to the commission.

“Healthy young dogs are being destroyed for no other reason than that they did not cut the mustard,” counsel assisting the commission, Stephen Rushton, SC, said.

The industry was reliant on over-breeding, also known as “wastage”. (The Sydney Morning Herald, September 28, 2015). 

Mr Rushton said it was “myth” that the regulator put animal welfare first, as it claimed. He said the industry was secretive, driven by profit and benefiting from “unspeakable acts of cruelty”.

The commission has also heard in private hearings conducted since June that the use of small animals as live bait was “rampant” until it was exposed by ABC's Four Corners program in February.

Two Sydney trainers told the inquiry 85 to 90 per cent of greyhound trainers used the practice or hired others to do so. They admitted to live baiting a dog at the Richmond race track, one of Australia's largest tracks. 

Trainer Wayne Smith said if his dog was a “problem dog”, not a “100 per cent chaser”, he would pay an “educator” $100 for a week's worth of live bait training.

“I expect evidence will be given this week that live baiting was seen as a traditional and necessary method of training young greyhounds,” Mr Rushton said.

The inquiry's commissioner, former High Court judge Michael McHugh, QC, said the greyhound death statistics were "appalling” and in his opening address in June, said he would consider shutting the industry down.

This evidence revealed last week laid out a compelling case for closing the industry. Even if only a fraction of Mr Rushton’s open address is validated by subsequent public evidence, the Commission will have little choice but to recommend the closure of the industry.

The evidence already gathered by the Commission shows an industry that is clearly beyond reform and it is doubtful if a new regulatory structure would change the industry’s deeply entrenched culture.

“The future of commercial greyhound racing cannot recover from the evidence Mr Rushton has exposed, even if the Commission fails to recommend a ban” said Greens NSW MP John Kaye.

So, whatever the Commissioner and the government do from here, the industry appears to be terminal.

It should be brought to an end in an orderly process. The alternative is that it be allowed to linger on, with tens of thousands of live bait animals and the dogs themselves living short and brutal lives.