David LinckIf you want to race greyhounds, your dogs need to be in excellent shape, well built, and exercise all of time. Luckily, greyhounds love to run, and that’s what they need to do to stay at their top speed. Of course, running form is just as important in a greyhound, if not more, as it is in an Olympic sprinter. Every incremental advantage in efficiency translates to a higher speed and more energy for longer duration and runs. If you want your greyhound to win you need to be thinking here. Racing form really is paramount. Okay so let’s talk shall we?
If you let your young greyhound run with dogs who are less competitive who don’t have the same level of form they will pick up bad habits. This is because greyhounds are a species which mimic the running styles of those other dogs they play with and train with. Don’t get me wrong, they are genetically superior regardless, nevertheless, even if your dog is of superior breeding, and faster than all get out, you can still run into problems with its form. Training a dog to have the perfect form is difficult. Yes, there are prosthesis type add-ons that you can make your dog wear to ensure that they don’t expend extra energy, but they don’t work for everything.
A few years back, DARPA had an interesting new device, a robotic cheetah. It would seem to me that in the future this robotic cheetah could be custom tailored and used in the form of a greyhound racing dog to help trainee dogs become better sprinters and more efficient runners. No, that robotic technology isn’t quite here yet, but we do have all of the computational mathematics needed to make this work. Then it would just be a matter of having your greyhound racing dogs chasing the robotic greyhound android. Eventually they would mimic its form as they ran.
This might indeed be a very good way to train these elite racing dogs, while ensuring that you didn’t have to watch them every step of the way, literally. Are these types of things been used yet? No, and there are other technologies which may come onto the scene before robotic greyhound racing dogs.
Holographic imagery might be another one, or lining the track with flat-panel screens using a digital image of a 3-D dog running. No matter what we choose in the future those that use the science of motion and canine ergonomics will be the ones that prevail due to superior training technologies and equipment. Please consider all this and think on it.
