Greek Animal Welfare Fund

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  Athens, Greece
Wednesday, September 24, 2008

I had read about the stray dogs and cats everywhere on the streets of Greece, but I was still unprepared to deal with the desperately sad sight every day. A dog follows me up the street every day on the way home. Cats weave between the parked cars lining both sides of the road. During my day at the beach last weekend, I saw dogs prostrate from the heat lying under trucks.

The students in my persuasion class are assigned to choose a contemporary Greek issue and create a persuasion project around it, and the stray animal situation is one of their choices. Today a guest speaker from the Greek Animal Welfare Fund gave a two-hour presentation on the problem, its causes, and the solutions they're working on.

I was shocked to learn that there is a cultural taboo against euthanasia, yet there is also a cultural assumption that if you have an "unwanted" pet, you just abandon it

Stray cats among the ruins in the Athenian Plaka

. So animals that are sick, instead of getting treatment or being humanely euthanized, roam the streets. And when unfixed animals have litters, the babies are just left in a box or a dumpster to fend for themselves. There are many laws on the books in Greece about animal treatment (for instance, it is required by law to microchip every dog so that the people who abandon them could be tracked down and fined), but the problem here is that nothing is enforced. Some strays fare decently well in the summer when tourists feed them, but in the winter when tourist season is over and entire island towns shut down, the animals freeze and starve. And ironically, although they're vehemently against euthanasia, if a shopkeeper or taverna owner grows weary of the begging strays around his shop, he just puts out poisoned food and murders them all.

Putting the animals in shelters might work in the States, but it's not an option here in Greece. There aren't enough shelters for the masses of strays. The shelters that do exist are overcrowded, devoid of grass, and oven-hot under tin roofs. Moreover, most Greek people have no interest in adopting a shelter pet. In the words of the GAWF guest speaker, "They want designer breed dogs to go with their designer clothes." Greeks have endured so much poverty, so much hunger, so much oppression that many of them now appear very materialistic because they cannot bear to have anything shabby, even a mutt doggie, that smacks of hard times.

The Greek Animal Welfare Fund visits schools to educate the next generation about kindness to animals, lobbies Parliament and local municipalities for laws and their enforcement, forms coalitions with other animal groups, and provides veterinary care. Every day the students and I see the suffering of the animals on the streets, and thanks to GAWF, we now have some way to make a small difference.

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Stray dog curled in the dirt by Athens marble

Island stray

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