Friends of Animals / Filozoikos NF

Hello S & Y,

I was very excited to find a link on a Facebook page to your Puppies Park. I put the information into the Greek to English translator, read the information, and was about to put it onto our Blog until I read the last paragraph. That you put people in touch with ’solid breeders’. This was very UN-EXCITING.

Instead of putting people in touch with breeders, why not recommend adopting one of the 300,000 stray dogs that are in Greece? Why add more dogs to a country that has difficulty understanding the concept of dog ownership in the first place?

The City of Athens said recently that over 10% of the dogs that they picked up and sterilized and returned to the street were of specific breeds. This is a new trend and a reflection of too many people breeding dogs for profit and of pet stores that are selling puppies with false promises. These breed dogs are not of better quality than street or mixed dogs, in fact, too many studies have shown that these dogs are MORE prone to disease, injury, and social problems due to their inbreeding, dependence on anti-biotics and sedatives. To say nothing of the puppy mill conditions that a majority come from.

I am sorry to say that we will not be recommending your fantastic Puppy Park to our 800 Facebook members or to the 100’s of foreigners who live in Athens with their dogs who rely on the Filozoikos Nea Filadelphia to help them with questions and answers about their dogs until your Puppy Park decides to become part of the dog overpopulation solution and recommends Shelter dogs - all vaccinated, sterilized, healthy, loving, and socialized.

Adopt! Don’t Shop!
www.friendsofanimals-nf.com

We have an advertisement on www.bigmarket.gr in the Pets Section to find homes for our dogs:

Received via email this morning:

Your ad title: Puppies & Dogs - FREE - Good Homes Wanted!
The message: i was wandering if you are still interested to get one of the chihuahua puppies you wanted or that you still have for sale because i have two chihuahua puppies male and female ready for sale so please if you are still interested then get back to us or you can still call us using the bunber 00237-76-53-28-31
Sender: valery, valeryakong@yahoo.com

Valery is obviously very confused! Here is her reply:

Hello Valery,

If you had read our advertisement carefully you would see that our group is 100% against breeding of any dogs for profit. In fact, we are one of the fore-runners of the ADOPT! DONT SHOP! movement in Greece.

With over 300,000 stray dogs running around this country breeding because Greeks don’t believe in sterilization, how can anyone justify breeding more? Especially in this country of dog abandoners.

You probably do not know how many ‘breed’ dogs we get at our Shelter and the other Shelters around the country. Have you ever seen a Maltese so matted and flea infested that it could not open its eyes wandering blindly around a plateia? We see stuff like that every week in the summer.

People buy from breeders and keep them until vacation or until they are not cute anymore and then dump them. The hundreds of dog rescue group in this country continuously fundraise to pay for the medical treatment, care and housing these dogs need until a ‘real owner’ comes to adopt them for free. The government gives us nothing. So our day to day pain and burden is at least half caused by breeders.

So please reconsider how you make your rent payments - off the continuous forced pregnancy of small animals. Kind of sick when you think about it.

Regards,

Helen, Volunteer
Friends of Animals NF
www.friendsofanimals-nf.com/blog