Rustic Sunshine is one of the many beautiful, calm, gentle and loving Greyhounds looking for a couch to call home.

There’s good news for Greyhounds. The number of dog tracks in the U.S. has dropped from 50 in the 1990s to 23 in eight states today—thanks the economic pressures and the public’s increasing awareness of the inhumane treatment of racing Greyhounds. But the decrease in Greyhound racing has created a short-term challenge: a surge in the number of homeless dogs. Greyhound Friends of New Jersey recently mounted a major effort to find homes for a large influx of ex-racing dogs, in this case, displaced by Massachusetts’s 2008 ban on live-dog racing and two track closures. To learn about adoption and fostering opportunities or to support these efforts, visit www.greyhoundfriendsnj.org.

Elsewhere efforts to shut down racing continue, spearheaded, since 2001, by GREY2K USA. Recently, Humane Society Legislative Fund’s president, Michael Markarian, highlighted GREY2K’s work on this all-too-often low-priority issue, citing steps forward in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and backward in Rhode Island.

Are you living in a state that just doesn’t get it? States with active dog racing tracks include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Texas and West Virginia. Might be time to tell your representatives how you feel about this cruel “sport.”