See Madrid and die

Thrown onto city streets.

Bumps, the smell of petrol, jolts, bends that make you fall over and the smell of diesel and dry earth mixed together. Then, suddenly, the brakes slam you into each other, the grunts and barks of pain as a fragile shoulder hits the overheated metal. Jaws slamming into the void.

The fear.

Then the light, dazzling after those hours of stinking darkness. Some couldn't hold back. The truck smells of urine. Screams, blows with sticks on the bodywork, clapping hands, blows, more blows. The same as when they boarded, and in front of them: an unknown space. Lined with huge houses, almost no trees, no land to stand on. Only stinking tar and concrete. And rumbling monsters whizzing past at breakneck speed, with a dizzying noise and a dizzying array of shapes and colors.

Escape. To where?

Nowhere. But far, far from the torturers, far from the beatings, far from starvation. But how to feed oneself in this concrete forest where even the trees are caged. No thickets, no burrows, no rabbits. Just a few garbage cans spewing garbage. You have to fight. There are many candidates. Only the strongest or most seasoned will eat. For the others, all the others, the majority, it will be hunger and thirst. Unless there's a welcoming stream some distance away.

Suddenly, the alarm sounds. Men are approaching. The same men? Others, but not much better. The employees of the pound, la perreira. They're there with their nets.

It's a desperate race, towards another day of anguish and hunger. Towards another death on a street corner, snatched up by a screaming iron machine. Who won't stop. You don't stop for a dog, let alone a galgo. It can die, its kidneys broken, its blood spilling onto the indifferent tarmac. There are so many of them...
For those who have been captured, the ordeal begins all over again. Cramped premises, hot in summer, freezing in winter. Beatings, no care. Insufficient food. The strongest eat. The weakest die in silence, the others fight and finally die. Torn apart. Sometimes devoured. And when the man appears, calm returns. If he's the worst torturer of all, it's no good resisting him. Galgos are like that. Confident. Overconfident. Patient. Too patient. Ideal victims!

Man sometimes brings food, rarely medicine and even more rarely freedom.

But today he's a different man. He doesn't feel violence and death. This man works for a galgos rescue association. He has managed to get a few galgos "released". In front of the others, apathetic, bewildered or hopeful, he takes some of them away from that infamous death row.

Perhaps the others will leave on a future trip. If not...

If not, they will join the thousands of galgos' corpses that disfigure Spain, and give it that smell of death that reigns everywhere, from its hunter-infested countryside to its arenas where death and suffering take the place of spectacle for beings I find particularly repugnant to describe as human.

Galgos who have left the hell of the perreira are heading for a new destiny.

At the end of this new path, there's another life. Freedom, departure for other horizons, for other countries where greyhounds are not instruments to be thrown away after being exploited and martyred.

You're about to meet one of these survivors of Spanish hunting and community practices. He expects everything from you, first and foremost to be treated like a living being, like a dog, affectionate, patient and loyal. It's up to you not to disappoint him!