Welcome To The Filozoikos Website
Friends Of The Animals - Elounda - Crete
The official site of Elounda's Local Animal Welfare Group,
Crete is a beautiful Mediterranean island and like its climate
the people are warm and friendly. However, kindness and friendliness
does not exist for many of the animals here hence the reason
for creating our organisation a few years ago.
Who Are We and What do we do?
We are a small animal welfare organisation and registered
charity dedicated to helping those poor animals who are
suffering and unable to help themselves. We rescue stray
dogs and cats from the streets and it is very often the
case that these strays have been cruelly treated or abandoned
and often starving. Life for them on the streets is hard
and dangerous as they run the risk of poisoning or becoming
a victim of the traffic.
As with all animals it is a natural instinct to reproduce
but this only adds to the problem. We put them into temporary
foster homes and with the help of visiting German vets we
sterilize them. This is the only long term solution to controlling
the numbers!
In the local schools children are receiving an educational
programme on animal welfare which is provided by our organisation.
Abandoned dogs and puppies are our daily work, fostering,
vaccinating and sterilizing them but our work is all the
more difficult because we don't have a sanctuary. We rely
on people offering their homes and fostering these animals
until they are ready to travel. When this time arrives,
we fly the dogs out to various parts of Germany and Switzerland
where they are being re-homed with the help of the charity
Arche Noah - Crete. Most of the stray dogs here on Crete
are very sweet natured - they have to be to survive! A piece
of our heart goes with every single one of them but there
are always more to help. Expenses are many; food, vets bills,
drugs, collars, airline carriers - every single animal needs
its own. Of course other expenses include our very much
used car and the airline tickets that will take them to
their new lives.
Everyone in our group is a volunteer and most of our group
are working hard in our own jobs during the summer. Winters
are spent fundraising and helping with the sterilisation
& castration programme. Even so on average we manage to
send between 100-120 dogs to Germany during the summer months
and between 20-30 during the winter when they travel by
the truck which is owned by the Arche Noah organisation
or, for urgent cases, by air cargo which can be very expensive.
We have two feeding stations for the stray cats; one in
Elounda and one in Aghios Nikolaos filled with dry food
and fresh water and they are maintained by us ALL YEAR ROUND.
They are intended to provide a regular source of food to
try and discourage stray cats from scavenging in the local
restaurants and tavernas. Sadly, over the last few years
we have had to remove several such feeding stations because
of vandalism and because of the food being stolen from them.
Some of our group are wives and mothers who have homes to
run in addition to their summer jobs and yes we all get
tired and emotional especially when we see the condition
of some of these poor animals. We realise that we can't
save them all but that will not stop us trying! Despite
the numbers of strays and the problems we face, what we
do promise is that we will always give our very best efforts!
