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Paradise or hell?
The last three years, my boyfriend and me spend our summer holidays on Crete. Greece has a great history, culture, nature and many friendly Greek people, the weather is perfect, the food is amazing. It sounds like a perfect paradise, could be, but this old splendid and "philosophic" country has a dark, bizarre and shameful side: the treatment of their animals.
This hypocrisy shocks me, you can almost believe they are cat lovers, so many postcards, calendars, towels, and other tourists stuff with cat subject, are there for sale. The reality is, that the tourist "paradise" is a hell for cats, most of them are kittens... Yes, you walk through to the paradise dropping on starving, frightened, sick kittens without their mothers, trying to survive inside and around the garbage bins and asking food to the people in restaurants and the hotels.
We have been on Crete last summer, September 2009, we enjoyed the beauty of that amazing island, but at the same time we felt bad many times and we felt so sad and sorry for those poor cats around us. It is not fair to sit in a restaurant to eat whatever we want while so many starving little lives looking at us, asking for a leftover from our food.
The dark side of this ignorance and cruelty is to know that many of that " nice and friendly Greek people" resolve the cat big population problem by killing them, specially after summer, when there are no protesting tourists anymore.
We have spent two weeks on Crete, carrying always in our bag cat food, water and clean plastic pots, and we fed and gave water to every hungry cat that crossed our way. It made us feel better to help just a little bit in that time.
I think everything wrong happens with the animals and with the nature in general, is the human been responsibility. I know there are some brave strangers, Greek people, and organisations fighting to help, to rescue, to give a chance to those orphan animals to have a good life inside or outside Greece. We adopted ourselves a kitten from Crete (she was dumped with 2 brothers and a sister in the garden of an animal shelter), and she lives very happy together with us and our others two cats in the Netherlands.
I cannot like and have fun in a country and to continue to like those people who kill, torture, throw away cats and other animals. I’m sure the Greek government should give a more attention and to have responsibility about their cats and other animals, I think the best way to resolve the cat big population problem, is to invest in a good neutering program, to educate people, specially older ignorant people and kids. They should learn to respect the animal lives. I think is very important to stop killing cats and other animals and to start, also, to punish crime and cruelty against animals.
I don't know, if I still want to spent my holidays and my money on Crete, I really don't like what I see and know about the treatment of animals. I don't feel good to walk in the paradise crying about many cats and dogs and see that horrible negligence. I hope something good happens to change that shameful reality, because, I am sure there are, also, many good Greek people. Eunice |