From Rat Race to Race Dog Rescue
By Bill Spring
As a highly paid, overworked manager in online services, Claudia Presto knew all about the rat race. But it was when she learned about dog races — specifically, the more than 50,000 greyhound dogs put down each year as part of the racing business — that she discovered her true calling.
Today, Presto runs the Greyhound Gang, a nonprofit organization dedicated to spreading the word about greyhound rescue and finding homes for these beautiful animals.
As a young girl growing up in Greenwich, Conn., in the '50s and '60s, Presto was crazy about animals. "I read every animal book I could get my hands on," she says. "I always thought I would be a vet, but as time passed, I realized I wasn't particularly interested in the science field."
Instead, Presto became a teacher. After earning degrees in education and counseling from the University of Connecticut in the mid-1970s, Presto spent three years teaching high-school English. But when she realized that her friends in the business world were earning much better salaries, she jumped ship in the early 1980s, landing at Waldenbooks.
There, Presto worked as a liaison between the tech-savvy systems folks and the ordinary computer users, showing employees at chain stores how to order and track inventory using mainframe computers. "My teaching skills kept coming out," she says.
Presto then stepped into the forefront of the computing world, working at Prodigy Services Company, a pre-World Wide Web community connecting subscribers and businesses. The company was still in its infancy. "They were beta-testing when I came in," she explains. "And I was their database queen." Presto worked hard, putting in 60 to 80 hours a week.
But Presto started to wonder why she was working so hard. "When I died," she says, "my tombstone wasn't going to say, 'She was the best employee (they) ever had.' " Presto's dissatisfaction came to a head when the company started asking her to lay off members of her team. "It just made me mad, so I said, 'I'm out of here.' " In 1993, Presto accepted a severance package and left the company.
Presto felt that she had been sidetracked by the desire to earn money — a desire she now believes society had imposed on her. Having just turned 40, Presto decided that from this point on, she would live by her own rules. "I bought a Chevy Silverado pickup truck and a camper trailer. My plans were to travel the country until I found a place where I wanted to stay."
Presto had been involved in greyhound rescue for over five years. It started while she was vacationing in Vermont in the late 1980s with her Afghan, and she met a woman who had rescued two greyhounds. "I was told that they were ex-racing greyhounds."
Presto, appalled to learn that racing trainers and dog farms euthenize tens of thousands of dogs each year just because the animals cannot earn money as racers, was determined to help. She joined a greyhound rescue group back in Connecticut.
So in 1993, when she set out on the road with her truck, camper and her own greyhound, Slim, Presto had two goals: Find a place to live, and dedicate her life to saving greyhounds. She ended up in the town of Kanab, Utah, home of the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. After working as a writer for its magazine and doing odd jobs to pay the rent, Presto founded the Greyhound Gang in 1995 as a nonprofit dedicated to the rescue, rehabilitation and adoption of ex-racing greyhounds.
For five years, Presto rescued greyhounds, fostering them on her 2-1/2-acre property and driving 3-1/2 hours to Las Vegas to find worthy families to adopt them. "And then I ran out of money. I knew that I needed to start concentrating on fund-raising."
Presto still believes in rescuing greyhounds and finding them good homes, but knows that she can do more good as a fund-raiser. Through her Web site, www.adoptgreyhounds.org, Presto gathers donations and disperses them to worthy groups and individuals who are rescuing, fostering and placing greyhounds. She also runs a canine vitamin and supplement business to earn income.
"We're in the process of trying to raise $400,000 to build a kennel in Colorado," Presto explains. The facility, called Almost Home for Hounds, will be built on 80 acres in Nunn, Colo.
"I can look into the eyes of every single dog that comes through my place," says Presto, "and I know that I've changed that dog's life. And the people who adopt that dog, their lives are changed too."
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