It's not easy, but it can be done. First, buy a greyhound puppy. Pick a good one, even though it'll cost you extra. You want it to turn out to be a good runner – a dog you can get the bettors to bet on, not a dud. Next, feed it and make sure it has all its shots and vet visits until it's old enough to start training for the races. When that happens, hire the best trainer you can find – don't spare the expense.

When your trainer has your puppy trained, enter it at the best track you can find in a race where it has a very good chance of winning right off the bat. You can do this by entering it in schooling races with the best puppies at the track and making sure that it can beat them, before it goes into "real" races. When it's ready, enter it in a Maiden race and hope that it wins by a mile. If it does, you're on your way. If it doesn't, try to train it to the point where it can at least look good in the middle grades, if not the top grades.

Now, you're ready to stiff this dog. Wait until it's entered into a big race, one where there's a lot of betting action and it's the chalk at really low odds. Now, here's where you choose your method. The famous "sandpaper on the pads to make them sensitive", or the old "make it swim in a pool until it's tired" or how about "make it eat a laxative before the race" so its mind won't be on running? The method isn't important. It's the results that are.

The race goes off and your dog – the big favorite – runs a really lousy race. If it had won, of course, you would have made a bundle in purse money and gotten points for your kennel, which would have translated into even more money. But, instead, you got – what? Not much. The pools just aren't big enough at the dog tracks to make it worth any trainer's while to stiff a dog, which is why, in spite of what you hear at the track, it rarely happens.

That's right. Almost every time when someone tells you that a dog was stiffed, what they mean is that they handicapped it wrong or bet it wrong or it just didn't come in for reasons that have nothing to do with anything that the trainer did or didn't do to it. Sometimes, dogs, like people, just don't perform well. Or, just as often, they're good but another dog is just a little better and gets some breaks during the race that make all the difference.

Kennel owners and trainers almost always care more about their dogs than they do about winning, but winning is second on their list of things to do with greyhounds. Even if it were possible – and it isn't likely that it is – to make a greyhound lose, why would a trainer want to jeopardize their dog, their reputation and their livelihood by doing something so stupid? Very, very few of them do. I doubt very much that ANY of the well-known, successful kennels do.

So, when you go over your program, pick a dog and it loses, don't wonder how they stiffed it. Figure out if you handicapped it wrong or if it was just a victim of circumstances. Instead of looking for the guy with the sandpaper, look at the guy who spends hours of time and effort, trying to train dogs to win, not lose. Trainers and owners aren't into stiffing dogs. They're into winning just like greyhound handicappers are.