Curing a Dog who crashes to Rail

Hi Stephen,

This I’m sorry to say is an extremely difficult problem to rectify, and impossible in some instances.

While you do want your greyhound to rail, unfortunately unless they are brilliant beginners, diving for the rail straight out of the boxes is only going to get them knocked around.

As with most bad habits this usually a learned response, and one you see more often with greyhounds where most of their early education in chasing and grabbing the lure, as well as teaching them to come out of the starting box, is done in a bullring.

The situation is aggravated if part of that box practice is done with a slow moving lure enticing the dog to make a left hand turn straight out of the box and grab the lure.

Because in many instances it is a learned response at an early age, re-education to eradicate this habit can be a long and slow process.

The most likely method to succeed is to give the greyhound lots of jumps out of a starting box over short distances, while only letting them out of the starting box when the lure is at least 10 metres in front of the box.

At least in this scenario the dog has a chance to sight the lure well up the track, and over time should start heading in a straight line out of the box towards the lure.

Two jumps out of the box at a trial track in each session, and two sessions per week over three or four weeks should see an improvement in their manners.

One word of caution, and that is that doing this may cause the dog to dwell in the starting box fractionally when you start running them against other dogs again, however if the dog is a keen chaser this should rectify itself quickly without any more work on your part.

Cheers,
Tom