Paul Wheeler’s Unspoken Legacy
Greyhound owner and breeder Paul Wheeler / Source: Facebook
The outpouring of racing industry tributes that attended Paul Wheeler’s passing last month ranged from the flattering (“Wheeler has achieved everything and more in greyhound racing, his contribution to the sport he loves simply profound”) to the hyperbolic (“not only Australia's but unquestionably the world's most successful owner and breeder”). They also—in the usual style of the greyhound racing industry’s PR machine—omitted hard and ugly truths. Wheeler welcomed interviews, was vocal in criticising industry decisions with which he disagreed, and accepted millions in prizemoney from Australia’s gambling industry, funded in part by the public purse. He was a public figure here and internationally, and as part of the reflection on his legacy, the true, awful scope of his contributions must not be forgotten.
For much of his life Wheeler was praised in the media as a “champion breeder”, as the man behind the famous—in the greyhound world anyway—‘Bale’, ‘Allen’ and ‘Dyna’ bloodlines that produced winners in some of Australia’s richest dog races. The chief prerequisite for Wheeler becoming a “champion breeder” was insatiable greed for more and more dogs, and he went to extraordinary lengths to get them, whether that meant travelling to the U.S. to find willing breeders to work with him, importing dogs and frozen semen from overseas, forcing bitches to have litters into their senior years, or setting up a property in Murringo, New South Wales, where he could raise up to 550 dogs at a time. In its obituary, Greyhound Racing New South Wales called Wheeler’s penchant for breeding “ingenious mating” that “enhanced the [Wheeler] family's greyhound dynasty.”
It was a different reality for the thousands of greyhound bodies left in his wake. For the puppies and young dogs among Wheeler’s litters that weren’t fast enough, that didn’t want to run or adjust well to the intense demands of racing life, culling and disposal would have been their fate. As Australia’s largest breeder for at least three decades, from the 1980s onwards—likely even longer, as he was active in racing from a young age, helping his father, who was a breeder through the 70s—perhaps Wheeler’s most “profound contribution” to dog racing was to become the single biggest contributor to the country’s monumental overbreeding problem that led to decades of mass dog killings.
That problem—grotesquely referred to within the gambling industry as dog “wastage”—only really came into the wider public focus in 2016, when the New South Wales Government held a Special Commission of Inquiry into dog racing in the wake of the now-infamous live-baiting footage aired by Four Corners. Evidence from that Commission suggested that a minimum of half of all greyhound pups born in New South Wales over the preceding 12 years had been “deliberately killed simply because they never were, or no longer were, capable of being competitive racing greyhounds”—with actual numbers estimated to be even higher, above 70 per cent—meaning that of the 97,783 whelped, up to 68,448 dogs were killed over those 12 years. Wheeler openly criticised those numbers in conversation with sympathetic journalists, as was in his interest as the country’s largest breeder, but chances are that during Wheeler’s time, the numbers would have been larger. Oversight of the industry was so lax, for so many decades, that it will never be possible to trace or document the true extent of the dogs killed. How many did Wheeler add to the pile?
Wheeler was “looking to put a bit of get up and go back into the breed”, as Greyhound Racing South Australia wrote in 2002, so he contributed to overbreeding in another way: becoming Australia’s pioneer of using frozen greyhound semen. This allowed him to “eliminate geographic restrictions” on breeding, and sidestep the waiting times for popular breeding sires. He bought up big on “the best the U.S had to offer”, and he turned frozen semen into a commodity, storing it at the Sandown Veterinary Clinic, selling it to other breeders and trainers, and using vets in South Australia, including the Adelaide Plains Veterinary Clinic, to put his dogs through the painful practice of artificial insemination. It was a good business move: even after they died, Wheeler ensured his most popular sires could still be used for money-making.
And money is, at its core, what dog racing is truly about: dogs as mass-produced products. Even in the best-case scenario for the 500 plus dogs Wheeler kept at a time, there was little room in the daily schedule for love and enrichment. Five years ago, Wheeler said he employed just 13 staff. Assuming those staff worked full-time, dedicating every hour to interacting with the dogs—not other tasks like cleaning and preparing food—that’s under one hour of one-on-one time with a human per week for each dog. In actuality, it’s highly unlikely they got even that much time.
What really mattered, according to the dog racing authorities, was the prize money Wheeler’s dogs won. In their obituary, Greyhound Racing New South Wales rattled off a list, positioning money as the only metric of success: “Fanta Bale earned $1,366,175 while Fernando Bale, arguably the greatest sprinter of all time, retired after winning $1.3m with Dyna Double One amassing $1.16m.” Curiously, they didn’t quote other relevant monetary figures, like the amounts Wheeler accepted to send his other champion dogs off to uncertain ends in China. Dogs bred and owned by Wheeler that received plenty of publicity during their racing lives—including Bekim Bale, Dyna Lachlan, Dyna Tron and Heston Bale—ended up there, apparently without Wheeler and the other owners and trainers associated with those dogs ever being questioned by the media on what happened to them when their track lives stopped.
Yet to claim that whatever damage Wheeler wreaked through overbreeding was perpetrated by him alone is foolish: the gambling-addicted Government of Australia was with him at every step, enabling him to pursue his greedy thirst for collecting dogs. Authorities at various levels, from local Councils upwards, deemed it acceptable for one man to raise up to 550 greyhounds on a property for the sake of a gambling industry; the Federal Government willingly signed off on Wheeler’s imports and exports of dogs and semen, and it was the Federal Government that signed off, every time, on his greyhounds being sent to China to be devoured by the underground racing industry there.
In its obituary, Chase News quoted Wheeler’s friend Graeme Bate, who said that Wheeler was “devastated” over the disqualification and fine he received in 2018 for selling greyhounds to China. In 2016, Wheeler claimed his annual turnover was $7 million. For sending dogs off to certain grim lives in China, he was fined just $22,000. “He never got over what they did to him,” Bate said. “He mentioned it almost daily to his family. He was so upset, completely and totally…” It was Wheeler that was the victim—not the dogs he shipped off to miserable lives in a country with no animal welfare laws, an underground greyhound racing circuit, and meat markets where greyhounds are one of the most common dog breeds to be found.
The Australian media fawned over Wheeler and portrayed him as a racing giant, “equivalent to Gai Waterhouse”, and in return he would opine and plainly lie, facing no pushback from spineless journalists. In one notable interview, Wheeler denied he sold many of his dogs on, and claimed that those he did “had lives”. Those that wouldn’t make the grade for him in New South Wales, he explained, were passed on to slower racing circuits in other parts of the country, like those to the west, in Port Pirie and Broken Hill. What Wheeler neglected to say was that while those circuits may have had slower dogs, the trainers still wanted to win, and dogs that couldn’t win were disposed of. According to an industry veterinarian who worked in South Australian racing until a decade ago, mass greyhound graves existed anywhere there was a race or trial track, including Port Pirie and Broken Hill. Wheeler was known to be extremely well-connected, with trainers and owners all over the country training dogs for him, buying dogs from him—it is inconceivable he didn’t know what awaited many of the dogs he sent west.
In 2016, Wheeler criticised the short-lived greyhound racing ban in New South Wales with an astonishing lack of concern for the dogs and other animals that had been shown to be killed and abused within the industry for decades, calling it a “slap in the face”. “It’s going to affect the whole nation,” he said in one video posted online, “Ah, I've got distributors of pet food in Victoria ringing me up, saying half his business is based in New South Wales…It’s really a devastating blow to the economy everywhere, really.” The widespread live baiting of dogs using possums and other small animals, the export of dogs to Macau, Pakistan and Vietnam, the billions in damage gambling inflicts on the national economy—none of that warranted mention. On overbreeding, Wheeler’s sentiments were exceptionally brutal. “I think it's a slap in the face for the government to make a decision like this based on an assumption of wastage figures and not determining how greyhounds are faring in relation to the other two codes of racing," he said. Translation: in the cycle of animal death created by Australia’s gambling industry, thousands of unwanted racehorses are killed too, with many trucked off to knackeries—it’s not just thousands of greyhounds. A comparative study of the number of horses killed versus dogs killed should be conducted before any of us face a ban.
Sometime after his last race in Cannington in February 2017, a dog bred by Wheeler, Ikaku Bale, mysteriously ended up in China—yet another from his breeding stock that will have bloodlines perpetuated there. Perhaps one of the truest measures of Wheeler’s legacy is the dogs like Ikaku Bale, sent overseas to countries known for cruel underground industries for the sake of making a buck, and the thousands upon thousands of dogs in Australia that ended up killed and buried for no good reason, only that they weren’t fast enough, or didn’t want to chase. Wheeler was portrayed in racing as a giant, a man that achieved greatness. He accumulated immense wealth in his life, he had some winners, but he also did unimaginable harm.