Why I Left the GAL Committee

The story begins on December 8th last year. Tara had just had surgery on her knee, and came home that morning. I wanted to be with her, but GAL was having an awareness day at the kennels, and one of us needed to go over with the shop. We also needed to hand our foster dog to someone else - a young, excitable lurcher in the same house as an injured dog is a recipe for disaster. One of needed to go, and in the end, Claire stayed with Tara, while Fiona and I went to the kennels. The day was a wash out. Torrential rain, and no one came. On top of it all, one committee member had to leave early to rescue her husband from a broken down car.

Ten minutes before leaving, I was suddenly told there was a committee meeting afterwards. I needed to attend, or there wouldn't be a quorum. Some sort of emergency had occurred, and decisions needed to be made. So, we left the kennels, and went to the closest hotel bar.

The "emergency" had its origins in an earlier argument. I won't go into details, but bad feelings on both sides led to some people quitting the charity, and some of those founded a new forum to talk about greyhounds. Given the arguments, unsurprisingly some of the posts were less than complementary about GAL - some were downright rude. The "emergency" was two-fold. First, a GAL volunteer who was walking some of the kennel dogs had taken some photos, and had posted them on the new forum. Second, the people who ran the kennels were posting on the new forum - not a great surprise that the people running the forum were good friends of theirs.

I wasn't in the mood for this to start with, but I fail to see why this is even worthy of discussion, let alone an emergency committee meeting. Based on that meeting, I'm in the minority. The anger that was displayed. "Trying to keep a foot in both camps." "Need to remember who's paying their bills." "Disloyal." "Betrayal." "They need us more than we need them." "Can't be trusted." "Need to choose a side." "Should ask out permission before posting photos." I was shocked, and struggled to keep my temper.

I tried to argue for tolerance. That people were allowed to choose their own friends. That you can't buy loyalty, only earn it. That if there were issues (and there were clearly issues on both sides) then they should be talked through and addressed. I was told later this was "hurtful" and "condescending", which is when I resigned from the committee.

And in the midst of all this arguing was the first mention of the new kennels...