KENOSHA — With Dairyland Greyhound Park just a month away from its last track action, adoption groups are racing in to help with a dog adoption campaign.

Just how large the effort will be isn’t yet known. Not until year’s end will the park know how many dogs will be available for adoption, Dairyland General Manager Bill Apgar said last week. But the park now has more than 700 dogs, and its kennel owners are already making more dogs available for adoption, he said.

Many of those greyhounds will continue racing at other tracks, Apgar said. By state law, he said, Wisconsin’s racing greyhounds can only have one of three fates when they leave a track:

n Go on to race at another track.

n Be taken back by their owners. Most greyhounds are owned by individual investors — and perhaps will be a pet someday.

n Be placed into adoptive homes.

Apgar pledged that Dairyland would stay open until all dogs have been properly placed. None would ever be euthanized, he added.

Dairyland has its own adoption center, but it only holds up to 28 or 29 dogs at a time, Apgar said.

Most Dairyland dogs will be channeled through adoption groups — led by the Greyhound Pets of America Wisconsin.

“We’re in it up to our eyeballs,” said GPA Wisconsin President Ellen Paulus.

Paulus said GPA members have expected Dairyland’s doom since the Geneva Lakes racetrack died in 2005.

“We’ve all been watching the headlines, knowing the track was not doing as well,” she said. When the Dairyland board of directors scheduled a vote on whether to shut down, Paulus added, “We kicked it into high gear.”

She said the planning included lining up lists of volunteers for tasks including: transporting dogs; bathing them and clipping toenails; holding meet-and-greets; and so on.

The dogs all have to be spayed or neutered, as all are sexually intact during their racing lives, Paulus said.

Foster homes must be prepared to teach the greyhounds about home life, she said. “They have no clue” about human homes, said Paulus, who has two greyhounds of her own.

Besides GPA Wisconsin, Dairyland is also working with state-approved adoption groups from several states in the region, Apgar said.

And since the closure announcement, he said, “We’ve had a lot of people apply” to adopt dogs. “And we’d love to see more of them come in,” Apgar said.

Most of the available greyhounds will be about 2-5 years old, he said.

Paulus said GPA Wisconsin — which already got “99 percent” of its adoptable greyhounds from Dairyland — is helping to move them to kennel owners and foster homes.

Based on the closing of the Geneva Lakes racetrack, Paulus said, there were about 500 dogs left to place in homes. “That’s sort of the number we’re preparing for,” she said.

In that case, the track closed in early November, and the last dogs went to their new homes by the end of April.