Greyhound racing updates

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2007:

The Alabama Supreme Court on December 1, 2006 ruled
unanimously that the MegaSweeps video sweepstakes gambling games at
the Birmingham Race Course violate the state law against slot machine
gambling. Track owner Milton McGregor asserted that losing the
machines, installed in 2005, might put the track out of business,
costing 250 jobs. Two lower court rulings favored video sweepstakes
gambling. “Soon, small storefront [gambling] operations began
popping up across the state,” wrote Philip Rawls of Associated
Press–and Christian Action Alabama began trying to close them.

The verdict came six weeks after Mobile County district
attorney John Tyson Jr. announced charges against 12 men and a woman
in a scheme to fix races at the Mobile Greyhound Park by giving dogs
an herbal male erectile supplement that caused their hearts to race
while they were nominally resting in their kennels. Exhausted, the
dogs then performed poorly in competition.

The Cloverleaf Kennel Club in Loveland, Colorado, announced
on November 30 that it will not open for racing in 2007. “We just
don’t have the financial wherewithal to run another live season,”
Cloverleaf president David J. Scherer told Associated Press writer
Catherine Tsai. The Cloverleaf track opened in 1955, six years
after greyhound racing debuted in Colorado.