Rescuer and welfare champion of retired racing greyhounds
ANNE FINCH, who has died aged 75, was a nurse who turned her considerable energies, with her husband, to rescuing and rehoming greyhounds.
Her interest in the animals’ welfare dated back to the late 1980s, when media reports surfaced of greyhound abuse and neglect in Spain. Every year, hundreds of Irish-bred greyhounds – known as galgos in Spanish – would be shipped for track-racing, coursing, hunting rabbits or for small betting races in local villages. At the end of the coursing season the animals would be abandoned or, in some rural areas, ritually hanged.
On an investigative trip to the island of Majorca in 1991, Anne Finch found
250 greyhounds being kept in concrete shacks, tied to the wall and, as she recalled, “alive with fleas”. Despite being low on funds and speaking no Spanish, she managed to talk the owners into a sale. Among the four animals she took home with her was Masay, a black greyhound whose plight she had seen featured in the British newspapers earlier that year.
Once back in England, Anne Finch’s account of the mistreatment and squalor she had witnessed shocked the World Greyhound Racing Federation into action. The kennels were shut down and the Federation suspended trade between Ireland and Spain for five months. Meanwhile, Masay was successfully rehoused with a family in Norfolk. However, it would take several years of further campaigning before the racetrack at Majorca finally closed for business.
By 1997 Anne Finch and her husband Arthur had rescued 60 greyhounds, ploughing some £40,000 of their life savings into the mission. The money went towards supplying refuges in Spain with trained staff and equipment, and to organising transport of greyhounds to new homes across Europe.
On a series of further trips to Spain Anne Finch and an investigative team managed to document instances of cruelty in hunting communities and at racetracks. “We saw spectators laughing at a dog so injured it could hardly walk to the traps,” she recalled. “Many of the dogs race with broken legs, dislocated toes and tendon injuries.” The rescue enterprise, Greyhounds in Need, became a registered charity in 1998, and could soon count Dame Judi Dench and Jilly Cooper among its patrons.
Beryl Anne Brooks – known as Anne from her late twenties – was born in Potters Bar on July 7 1943, the daughter of Harry, a draughtsman for the de Havilland aircraft factory at Hatfield, and Grace Brooks. After Mount Grace School, she graduated from Durham University with a degree in Music and French and enrolled as a nurse at Royal Holloway College (now Royal Holloway, University of London).
She adopted her first greyhound in 1986, and soon became interested in her pet’s background: details of a greyhound’s trainer, breeder and racing history can be traced through the identifying tattoos in each ear. This put her on to the export network between Ireland and Spain, and hence to the issues of racetrack welfare and the fate of greyhounds whose competitive days were over.
In 1996 the publisher Ringpress commissioned her to write Pet Owner’s Guide to the Greyhound, which covered everything from navigating the adoption process to confronting the moment a beloved pet might have to be put down.
Highly motivated and intelligent, Anne Finch had a knack for persuasion and a total dedication to her cause. On one occasion she convinced the principal and the chaplaincy of Royal Holloway to host a blessing of 30 greyhounds on the feast of Saint Francis – accompanied by the music of the Royal Holloway string quartet and Anne Finch herself on the piano.
Anne Finch married her husband Arthur, a chemistry professor at Royal Holloway, in 1987 and he died in 2007. There were no children from the marriage.
Anne Finch, born July 7 1943, died August 5 2018