Porcia's Greyhound Retirement Home
Welcome to Porcia's Greyhound Retirement Home. This is a family website, kept in the Seattle area since the late 1990s for one straightforward reason: we love Greyhounds, and the ones who have lived with us deserved somewhere to be written down. We are not a rescue group, a kennel or a business of any kind. This site is nothing more than an expression of our love of Greyhounds and of the other dogs who have shared the house with them.
The retirement home is named for Porcia, the first Greyhound to take over our sofa. It now features Flying Kiowa Ray (February 15, 1996 – August 26, 2005), Lift Off — better known as Kristy the Kamikaze Kissing Machine — and US Luck of the Draw, called Lucky, the newest resident of the Greyhound Retirement Home.
Porcia — August 3, 1992 – September 22, 2003
Porcia passed away in the late hours of September 22, 2003. She was eleven years old. We continue to maintain this website in her memory, and in hopes that at least one person might be motivated by it to adopt a retired racing Greyhound. Please enjoy Porcia's website and join us in remembering her, and all of the wonderful retired racers and other animals that have come and gone from our lives.
Porcia was born August 3, 1992 in Nebraska and raced until December 1995. Her racing name was Becbob Gladys, and she was renamed shortly after her first adoption. She was rescued by a Greater Northwest Greyhound adoption group and returned to them by her first two adoptive homes — given back twice, through no fault of her own, before she ever reached us. She came to us in May 1999.
It took Porcia several months to adjust to our home, and particularly to our Smooth Fox Terrier, who simply couldn't understand why Porcia didn't want to play 24 hours a day. After months of being pestered by a dog a quarter of her size, she decided to finally settle in. Porcia brought more joy than we could have imagined to our lives, and we hope her last five years with us were some of her best. Her own memorial page is the quietest corner of this site.
We miss you Porshy! See you at the bridge.
The Residents
Flying Kiowa Ray came to us in January 2001 from a Florida Greyhound rescue: nearly five years old, alarmingly thin, and carrying every worm known to science. He became a certified therapy dog who never met a person he didn't like, and he is missed by a great many people who met him only once.
Kristy, registered as Lift Off, arrived in March 2004 as a foster dog and awarded herself a permanent place within a few days. She ran eight races, never finished better than fifth, and retired before she was two. She has since found her real vocation, which is kissing people whether or not they asked.
Lucky, registered as US Luck of the Draw, is the newest resident. He came to us through a Greyhound adoption group in the Puget Sound area at four and a half, after a genuinely successful career on the track. He sings on command, hoards every toy in the house onto one bed, and answers to Knucklehead.
All of them share the house with Zoe, our Smooth Fox Terrier, who has her own end of this website and a far higher opinion of herself than the Greyhounds have of themselves. Her side of things includes her show career, her collected wisdom, the toys she has personally destroyed, and a gallery of friends.
What You'll Find Here
We hope you enjoy your visit to the Greyhound Retirement Home. You will find some useful information on Greyhound adoption, living with retired racing Greyhounds, and animal-assisted therapy. We also post as many pretty pictures as we can take, and try to have a little Greyhound fun as well.
If the breed is new to you, start with our Greyhound facts page, which covers the things people are always surprised by: the forty-five-mile-an-hour couch potato business, the thin skin, why a retired racer usually cannot be trusted off lead, and why "surely he needs miles of running every day" is the most common misunderstanding about the breed. The American Kennel Club's Greyhound breed page makes a good, sober second opinion. Our foster dogs page describes what it is like to have a dog pass through the house on the way to somewhere permanent, the links page collects the adoption groups and resources we found useful, and the site map lists everything else.
Therapy Dogs
Ray and Kristy were both certified as therapy dogs through a national therapy-animal certification program, with their dad as handler. Together they made volunteer visits to residents and patients at healthcare facilities around Seattle, including a hospice residence and a children's hospital. Our therapy dogs page explains what that work involves, how the screening and evaluation process works, and why a therapy dog is not the same thing as a service dog. Its photographs are from classes, not visits; confidentiality rules that out. The American Veterinary Medical Association keeps a clear overview of animal-assisted interventions if you would rather have the professional framing than ours.
Pannus
We have included a page about Pannus, an autoimmune condition of the eyes with which both Porcia and Ray were afflicted. It is quietly common in this breed, yet almost nobody hears of it until a veterinary ophthalmologist says the word out loud about their own dog. We wrote that page hoping it would be a source of information for other people living with Pannus dogs. We are not veterinarians, and we say so plainly on our about page: everything there is one household's experience, never medical advice.
Pictures, and Why We Keep This Up
The photo album is the most visited part of this website. For years the site invited people to send in pictures of their own dogs, and a great many did; those photographs still make up most of Zoe's gallery of friends. There is also a short piece that circulated widely in the early days of dog message boards, written from the dog's point of view, which nobody here has managed to read all the way through.
Porcia has been gone since 2003 and Ray since 2005, and this site is still here. It stays up because of the second half of that sentence near the top of the page: if one person reads it and goes on to adopt a retired racer, the whole thing was worth doing.
We miss you Porshy. See you at the bridge.