Bang the drum slowly for Irish greyhounds

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2006:
DUBLIN–The Irish Greyhound Board reportedly used DNA
profiling to trace the owner who abandoned a racing greyhound in
Tramore, County Waterford, in April 2006, after cutting off her
ears to remove her tattoos. The Waterford SPCA found the greyhound
roaming at large. The owner was located in Munster. No further
information about the case has been disclosed.
A furor broke meanwhile when John O’Connor, manager of
Custy’s Traditional Music Shop in Ennis, County Clare, admitted
selling bodhran drums covered with greyhound skin. “We sell
greyhound,” O’Connor told Mark Tighe of the London Sunday Times,
“but the majority of our bodhrans are sourced locally and made from
goat or calf skin. In every tourist shop you go into, those
mass-produced bodhrans would be from the subcontinent and would
generally be greyhound or some other poor-quality skin.”

Responded Niall Walton, managing director of Walton’s Music
in Dublin, selling more than 5,000 bodhrans a year, “I have never
seen or heard of any skin other than goat being used.”
About 24,000 greyhounds are registered each year in Ireland,
home of the bodhran. Most are made these days in Pakistan, which
has no western-style greyhound tracks, but has some hare coursing
and point-to-point greyhound racing.