Daly benefiting from decision to reduce racing numbers in favour of expanding homing operation

Daly benefiting from decision to reduce racing numbers in favour of expanding homing operation

Nottingham trainer this afternoon explained his decision to reduce his racing numbers in favour of increasing his homing operation

“I was waiting for us to progress a little bit as it was a little bit slower than I thought getting it all together. We got the Greyhound Trust on board last year and we are working under their charity status. Mildenhall Greyhound Trust had nowhere to go and had no kennels, so they asked us if we would accommodate the Mildenhall branch. We were looking at re-homing at the time and we said to them that we would really like them to come to the kennels and work together with us and that’s what they did initially" 

"We worked with Wisbech Greyhound Trust and then came the closure of Suffolk Downs, and we inherited the Kings Lynn Greyhounds as well and have taken over that area, so we are operating in quite a large area at the moment from Mildenhall to Wisbech and over to Kings Lynn. We’ve got a lot to aim at there; we’ve just got to get out and about and let people know we are there"

"The kennels are basically split. We have room for 100 Greyhounds, so we have 50 that are racing, and another 50 that are for homing. Nottingham have 25 spaces with us specifically for Nottingham dogs, so we work off their list about who comes in next, the Greyhound Trust have 15 spaces with us and we keep the remaining kennels for ourselves" 

"It’s working really well. I think if we had just stuck with the racing and held onto the retired dogs ourselves, I think we would have folded to be honest. We are quite a large kennel, and our staff wage bill is over £150,000 a year and at the time, we built up a large retirement list of our own of around 50 dogs. A lot of them were owned by us so we were in a bit of trouble then, so we had to diversify ourselves otherwise there was only one way we were going to go. But we’ve worked our way out of trouble now and things are looking really bright"

Daly continued "The last couple of weeks we’ve had 7 re-homed and a further 5 more pending on home checks, so it’s been a really good period for us. We’ve been getting ourselves out locally doing a lot of shows, there’s a lot of agricultural shows around this way which suits the Retired Greyhound needs. We’re also at Kings Lynn most Saturdays with a stall outside one of our owner’s shop. Ian Cook, who has got 5 retireds at home himself, he has an antiques shop in Kings Lynn high street, and we set up a stall outside his shop, so the locals are getting used to us being there and we get a lot of enquiries through that"

The Jim Daly Homing team, who can be found under that name on Facebook,  recently visited Barton Manor Care Home and brought along "Serin", who spent the afternoon meeting the residents, and Daly explained how that came about.

"We contacted the manager of the branch to see if we could go down there. It’s a nice thing to do as it gives the elderly a chance to see the dogs, and they really were pleased to see the dogs and make a fuss over them. But it also worked well as an advertising point of view as the branch have posted pictures on the Facebook group so it was definitely something worth doing and they’ve invited us back again so we will take a couple of new dogs down there again in a couple of week’s time"

Social media is a huge part of people's lives nowadays but it can also play a huge part in the re-homing of Greyhounds, which Daly explains

" We’ve just started on tik-tok but we’ve got a few youngsters in the kennel who are quite big on their socials. We’ve got one young girl called Katie Bliss and she’s just started the tik-tok and she hardly had anyone on her account, so she put up a video the other day of our longest stayer, a Greyhound called Rathcrea Well, who raced at Crayford and Suffolk Downs. He had been waiting for a home for 2 years, and we were averaging around 5-7k view per post before that. She put that one up and it went crazy!"

" Within 48 hours we had 78k views and we had more inquires than we could deal with at the time, but he was re-homed as a result and another couple went on the back of him as well, so it was a brilliant tik-tok to put out and you just have to look at the different ways you can showcase your Greyhounds that need homes."

"There's still a need to get out there though and meet people, we go to a Pets At Home store for a meet and greet and they are good with us and give us plenty of food. We also do Nottingham Stadium on a Friday night, a couple of the young girls walk around with a couple of retired dogs so that people can see them. We’ve been up there 8 times now and managed to home 3 as a result, so that’s working well as well"

"But we’ve had a lot of help from the Greyhound Trust. Ann Raymond is our team leader and is assisted by Ray Harding. Ray was a CEO for West Norfolk County Council and he’s got a lot of friends in the right places. We’ve spent £50k on upgrading the kennels over the last 12 months. One block has been completely upgraded with new kennel doors, windows, roof and painted it, and Ray got Steve Barclay who is a local MP, he’s going to come down to the kennels in the next couple of weeks and officially open it so we a bit more publicity for us. We also have an Open Day at the kennels in July and it would be great if people were to come along"