Animal welfare tips for Crete travelers
            A stray guide for the animal-friendly tourist

For many tourists in Crete and other southern countries, stray cats and dogs are part of their holiday. Many a slice of ham from the breakfast table and leftovers from dinner are secretly taken along in plastic bags to be fed to a favorite stray animal. Often, this is how these animals manage to survive, which is why look up ‘their tourist’ at each breakfast or dinner. Towards the end of many a holiday, hearts are broken when Fido, Patch or Mickey have to be left behind to fend for themselves….

Who can resist this appealing look?

It is even harder when one finds wounded animals or puppies. Many animal loving tourists wish to take a found, sick or affectionate animal home with them. In most cases, this is not necessarily a good solution though. With this guide, we would like to help you act properly when you find helpless strays.

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1. Does this animal need my help?

In principle, every stray on Crete needs your help, but in various ways. Grown or half grown strays that can look after themselves do often beg, but are otherwise able to find their own way around. They’re happy to receive some food and a bit of attention from you. Crete’s ownerless dogs and cats usually collect their food from trash heaps and -containers and have strong stomachs.

Teamwork by the container – not only the many strays feed themselves with trash...

Almost everything humans eat, also satisfies a dog. Cats tend to be a bit fussier.
Still, there are a few things you shouldn’t give the animals:

• Cooked of grilled bones (these can’t be digested by dogs and can lead to bowel problems and eventual death),
• Onions (these can be poisonous for dogs),
• Chocolate (not suitable for dogs),
• strongly seasoned and spicy foods.
  

Treat a cat to sausage, meat and fish, but avoid giving them heavily salted meat. And please don’t give them milk!
If you’d like to be quite sure it’s OK, then buy them regular animal food. You’ll find stores in any larger town on Crete, and also numerous mini- or supermarkets, which can be found on every street corner. These usually sell tins and dried animal food for both dogs and cats.

An animal shop in Agios Nikolaos, which also supports local animal welfare activity.

Hotel owners generally don’t like it when strays are fed. Therefore it is a better idea to find a place at a slight distance from the hotels where you can feed the animals. An independant stray doesn’t require any further direct help. It leads its own life and its main problem is to feed itself. Don’t be misled by a stray that may look sick to you. In Germany, we are used to well fed, well groomed and parasite-free dogs, which sometimes makes a stray look ill to us. However, this is just the way a free animal living on the streets tends to look. Fleas and ticks, a not so clean sleeping place, healing wounds and hunger may mark and animal, but this doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be alright (during the season, at least!).

Full of fleas, dirt and clits, but fed and satisfied!

Really, the best way you can help these strays is to support the animal welfare workers on Crete and Noah’s Ark’s support organization. They see that the strays are castrated to help keep the population under control. The animal welfare workers also provide food at regular feeding locations, which help the animals to survive outside the season as well.

(Water- and) feeding place in the centre of Agios Nikolaos

The animal welfare workers depend on your help!
You can support the animal welfare work on Crete by taking on a foster parenthood or by becoming a member of Noah’s Ark’s support organization!

--> Animal foster parenthood
--> The Support Organization

If you find an animal that is obviously ill or wounded and in need of veterinary care, please contact one of the addresses mentioned below, or contact a local veterinarian.

--> Go to the contact page

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2. Puppies

The problem with puppies on Crete is enormous. The only way to conquer it is by organizing castration projects on a large scale. Tourists that find kittens or puppies are almost always touched by the sweet baby animals and they often take one or the other along in their hand luggage, to ‘save’ it. Many animal welfare workers with golden hearts, but with a wrong attitude towards this problem, even wait at airports for compassionate travelers who are prepared to take the babies with them and deliver these to foster addresses in Germany. Please be extremely skeptical when encountering such people and don’t let yourself be talked into spontaneous foster travel parenthood!

Never take a puppy away from its suckling mother, not even if it looks as if it’s ready to stand on its own feet and is trotting around happily. Mother’s milk often forms the only way to build up a puppy’s resistance against the many epidemics there are on Crete.

A crate with kittens – found beside a street in Heraklion.

If you find discarded puppies, please contact one of the animal welfare organizations. Please note that in some cases the puppies may be refused, if the organization doesn’t have the resources to cope with them. In these cases, please remember that the animal welfare workers are acting responsibly! Wait for several hours to see if a mother turns up if you find a nest of puppies. Puppies that have been discarded by humans to die, can usually be found in containers like boxes and bags, in trash cans or on rubbish heaps.
Under no circumstances should you give the babies milk. If they are so small that they need to be bottle-fed, they are better off with professional care. Older puppies may be fed with mashed tin food or soaked dried food. If they have teeth, the puppies are able to eat anything that grown dogs can eat as well.

Never, ever, take animals with you to Germany on your own initiative without having valid vaccination papers and without the certainty that they have been checked by a veterinarian!

Especially young dogs and cats are hardly ever completely healthy. The stress of the journey and the abrupt change of environment and climate can often cause potential illnesses to erupt. Only under the following circumstances is a journey to Germany a good and responsible idea:

• The animal should be at least 16 weeks old.
  Why? Because you can’t be sure that a vaccination is reliable until the animal is 10-12 weeks old. After the vaccination, the puppy should remain in its familiar surroundings for at least another 4 weeks, to be given a chance to cope with the vaccination. Only after that, so when it is at least 16 weeks old, can one be reasonably certain that one will be delivering a strong and healthy animal, which will be able to cope with its new circumstances, to its new owner in Germany.
• The puppy must be entirely healthy.
• It must have valid vaccination papers.
• Legal guidelines concerning the importation of animals must be respected. For instance, animals must be vaccinated against rabies when imported to Germany.

We must not forget that the majority of animal babies, which are found without a mother, don’t survive their first few weeks, despite all the care that is provided by animal welfare workers and veterinarians. Lack of nourishment, mother’s milk and warmth makes them weak and they don’t have any resistance against illnesses when they are so young. These poor creatures are not helped by being taken abroad ‘before they are infected with something or other on Crete’. They should be spared the ordeal of a traumatic flight, only to become sick and die from the first bacteria they encounter in Germany.

This pack of puppies in animal shelter ‚The Haven’ in Malia has survived and will soon travel to new homes.

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3. I would like to keep this dog

If you encounter a stray you have fallen in love with and you want to take it home with you, please be aware of the following points:

• If you take a stray animal to Germany (or other places) with you, you take on full responsibility for the well being of this animal and for everything it does. It is not so, that you can simply hand it over to the German animal protection service if you should find it hard. German animal shelters seldom have space to spare, certainly not for dogs and cats that are difficult to mediate or that are from abroad.
• Strays are usually not house trained and have yet to learn where they may do their business and where they may not. In the case of some adult dogs, this is a difficult thing to learn and it may take weeks, even months.
• It may well be that the dog is suffering from one or several illnesses. You will have to be prepared to take on the cost of the treatment in Germany.
• Import regulations in Germany demand that there is proof of vaccination against rabies. Also, micro chipping is going to become compulsory throughout Europe soon.
• You need to inform the Airline Company that you want to take an animal with you, before the trip. It is possible that the company may refuse to transport the dog or cat. As a rule, animals over 4-5 kg. are not allowed to be transported in the passenger area. The animal needs a transport box, which needs to be large enough for it to be able to stand up and turn around in (regulations). When transported in the passenger area, the animal must also be kept in a transport box and it is not allowed to walk around freely. A dog must be given a sedative before the flight, and the dosage must be chosen appropriately. It is cruel to let it travel in the baggage area without sedation!
  
  --> Info page Foster Travel Parents (german)
  
  
• Should there be any suspicion of a physical ailment, then it is possible that the person in charge of veterinary care at the airport of destination may decide to place the animal in quarantine.
• Your everyday life in Germany will be completely changed by an animal. No dog should be left alone for more than four hours and every dog needs to be taken out several times a day for walks that take 1-3 hours.

So if you lose your heart to a stray, please get in touch with one of our contact persons on Crete. --> Contact

You will receive sound advice and they will help you to arrange the best (and legal) way to take the animal with you.
In some cases, you may have to travel home alone and pick up the animal in Germany some weeks later.

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4. Saving Dogs

If you enjoy Crete’s nature and like to go for walks, you will stumble across one sooner or later: a barrel dog.

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, this old Alsatian mix spends its life on a chain.
Animal welfare workers look after it with water and food.

As an old tradition, dogs on Crete are often used to guard fields, building sites or ground on which animal stock is held. Many animal friends are shocked when they come upon one of these dirty, totally frightened dogs, and feel the need to save it on the spot.

A common and horrid sight on Crete: Dogs wasting away in the dirt somewhere.

It is, however, a fatal mistake to set one of these chained dogs free, as it is regarded as theft on Crete and is heavily punished. Actions of the sort have often got animal welfare workers into serious, existential trouble.

So what should one do?

• If you come across a situation which you feel needs attention from animal welfare, then take a photograph if possible, make a note of the place and the time and try to find another eyewitness to confirm what you have seen. Report what you have found to your travel guide, the hotel supervisors, local tourist offices, and if the case is very serious, to the local police. If you are not taken seriously, you can make it clear to person you’re speaking with that a lot of Cretan people make a living out of your visit. Tell them in a calm and formal way, that you would like to return to Crete again when the animal’s situation has changed for the better.
• Contact the local animal welfare organization and tell them what you have seen. --> Animal Welfare Partners on Crete
• • Document as many details as possible and send us a copy of your report. --> info@archenoah-kreta.com

Three legal ways to improve the situation for a barrel dog

1. Authorities can force the owner to keep his dog in a way, which is according to animal welfare standards, or hand it over to animal welfare workers. It must be said, however, that this is uncommon practice in Greece.

2. Animal welfare workers take care of the dog by providing food and water on a regular basis and improving its shelter conditions if necessary. These actions need to be discussed with the owner of the land and the barrel dog beforehand though!

3. The owner understands that it is in his favor to keep the animal under better circumstances and changes the situation.

For this reason, it is important to speak of positive experiences regarding animal welfare too. There are a lot of people on Crete who treat their animals well, and who try in some way to help lessen the stray animals’ suffering.

Friends

There have been a lot of positive changes regarding animal welfare on Crete lately and one of the main reasons is because you, the visitors of Crete, have spoken up!

So, try to see the good situations as well as the bad, talk to these people and tell us what you have seen! Many Greek people and tourist organizations have reacted to the massive protests from shocked animal friends and are now supporting castration projects and other initiatives taken by animal welfare groups. Many hotel owners and tourist guides have become sensitive to animal welfare and are pleased to hear your positive comments!

Thomas Busch sets some cats free by the entrance of a large hotel in Heraklion.
The animals were caught here earlier in collaboration with the hotel management, and castrated by veterinarians. .

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5. Stray dog behavior

Social behavior
The many thousands of stray dogs on Crete live in packs. Naturally, these are not packs that live as they would in wildlife, as their existence and survival on Crete depends on a great many unnatural circumstances, but the animals do have very well developed social behavior thanks to their living together so closely.

3 Strays enjoy the sunset in Chania together.

Stray dogs are tolerated by the locals in areas that are vastly populated by tourists; it was quickly understood that many visitors take a liking to the dogs. So they leave the dogs be – at least until the season is over…

The dogs depend on people, for instance, they feed themselves with the enormous quantity of trash produced by the tourist industry and are also fed by the tourists. Even puppies soon learn that humans are good food suppliers.

There are a great many breeds on Crete. Not only mixtures, but also thoroughbreds that have been imported to Crete by tourists, immigrants or local animal friends and have been able to reproduce there.

This thoroughbred boxer is guarding a trash heap.

The drawbacks
Unfortunately, there are still too many dogs that have to live their lives being kept on a short chain or under the most unworthy circumstances. Strays that have had negative experiences with humans will react with fear, wariness or shy behavior. Please read Constanze Haag’s report on the page on „Animal Welfare Topics“:
--> Problem behavior caused by fear (german)

Why dogs from Crete are so popular

• The dogs are generally very well socialized because they have been in regular contact with humans as well as other dogs and cats, etc., starting from the time when they were puppies; they are familiar with many experiences in the world that surrounds them, from an early age onwards.
• The dogs are usually friendly towards humans, and like to receive attention.

  
  A friend for life

• Strays dogs are masters in survival. They learn an astonishing amount of different kinds of behavior within their packs. There is not a lot of aggression, because the dogs that behave aggressively towards other dogs often have less chance of survival. But this also means that the dogs need our special attention. They learn quickly, but also need more attention, challenges and things to occupy themselves with, as boredom can easily lead to problem behavior.
• A dog’s life on Crete is tough. Not only the fight for food, but also the climate only allows the most resistant dogs to survive. Cretan dogs are robust. But never underestimate the danger of southern European diseases like Parvo or Distemper. Only dogs that have been checked by a veterinarian should be imported into Germany.

The points we have discussed in this article are, of course, also relevant for other southern countries. Not only Cretan dogs have well-socialized behavior. You will find similar situations on the Canary Islands and within many other animal welfare projects in southern Europe.

Should you have any further questions or if you would like more information about Crete’s stray animals, we would be happy to provide it!

--> info@archenoah-kreta.com

More info on our Cretan page:
--> Mediation Database (in german)

translation: Susan Brinkmann
April 2003, Text und Fotos: Stefan Grothus

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