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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: January/February 2007

Greyhound racing updates

 

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.