Porcia’s Greyhound Retirement Home Retired racers, one small terrier, and everything we learned from them
A leather dog lead, an open notebook, reading glasses and a mug of tea on a desk by a window
A leather dog lead, an open notebook, reading glasses and a mug of tea on a desk by a window

Favorite Links

We hope you have enjoyed your visit to Porcia's Greyhound Retirement Home. What follows is not a directory and never tried to be one. It is a record of the resources we actually relied on across the years we kept this site: the references we went back to when a dog's eyes changed, when we were preparing for a therapy-dog evaluation, or when somebody asked us a question about the breed that we could not answer off the top of our heads.

Only reference material is listed. The original version of this page also carried a handful of local businesses and friends' personal sites, and those are gone — most of them no longer exist, and a private photo album is no place to be sending people to spend money. Everything below is a stable, non-commercial reference we would be happy to hand to a new adopter.

Greyhound Adoption and Living With Greyhounds

  • Greyhound breed reference — the straightforward breed profile. Useful mostly for correcting the two things everybody believes about Greyhounds: that they need hours of running, and that they are highly strung. Both are wrong, as anyone who has tried to get one off a couch will confirm.
  • General dog care — plain, unglamorous basics on feeding, housing, handling and settling a new dog in. A retired racer arrives having never seen a staircase or a glass door, so the basics matter more than usual.
  • Veterinary pet owner resources — the reference we would point at first for anything health-adjacent, and a good corrective to whatever you have just read on a message board at one in the morning.
  • Pet owner resources from the veterinary hospital accreditation body — short, practical guidance on preventive care, dental health and what a good annual visit ought to cover.
  • University canine health center — evidence-based owner-facing articles from a veterinary college. If we could only keep one bookmark from this entire page it would probably be this one.
  • Smooth Fox Terrier breed reference — for the other half of this household. Read it before you conclude that a small smooth-coated dog will be a low-maintenance addition to a house full of sleeping sighthounds. See also Zoe's own account of her vocabulary.

Therapy Dogs

  • Animal-assisted interventions — the clearest short explanation we know of the difference between animal-assisted activities, animal-assisted therapy and service work. Those three things get muddled constantly, including by people who ought to know better.
  • Human-animal bond research — the research side of why any of this works at all. Worth reading if you are considering putting your own dog forward for certification and want to know what is actually being claimed.
  • University animal-assisted interaction program — a veterinary-school program covering animal-assisted interaction and education, including the welfare of the dog doing the work, which is the part everybody forgets.

Our own experience of all this is on the therapy dogs page: what the evaluation involved, what it asks of a dog, and how two very different Greyhounds handled it.

Pannus

  • American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists — the specialty body. Pannus is a condition you want a veterinary ophthalmologist looking at rather than a general practice, and this is where you find one.
  • Corneal disorders in dogs — the reference-manual treatment of the cornea, including chronic superficial keratitis. It is written for clinicians, so it is heavier going than the rest of this list, but it is accurate and it is not trying to sell you anything.

Both Porcia and Ray were pannus dogs, and what living with it was actually like — the ultraviolet light, the drops, the sunglasses, the long slow management of it — is written up on our pannus page. That page is our experience, not medical guidance; the two references above are the ones to trust.

The original version of this page invited people to write in with link requests, and a great many did. There is no longer any way to write to us, so the list stands as it is: a record of what we used, left up for whoever comes looking. If you want the shape of the whole site instead, the site map has everything on one page.