June 14
We arrived our first day and visited one of the shelters in Athens, the KAZ shelter. KAZ is the Katafigio Adespoto Zoa shelter for stray animals. They are an amazing facility and a rarity in Greece. There are very few shelters and many provide worse conditions than life on the streets. There is no money to support the building and operation of shelters so they are virtually non-existent.
KAZ was originally designed as a transition facility; a temporary stop to treat sick and injured animals. They have a small surgical facility, recovery area and kennels. They have been forced to expand their kennels to try to accommodate dogs that have been abandoned or dropped off at the shelter in the middle of the night. Sometimes entire litters of puppies are left outside the shelter. This additional burden has made it even more difficult for them to continue to operate with the limited funding they have (none of which is from the Greek government).
We brought over a bunch of veterinary supplies that we collected from the states to donate to KAZ. The folks were thrilled to receive the supplies, which included medications, syringes, needles, surgical supplies and other medical items.
The next day we headed to Ionnina for the rest of our animal welfare work. We also brought some veterinary supplies for the local animal welfare folks here. We are building feeding stations that they will use for the feeding rounds that they make to help feed the local stray population there. We originally planned to build one each for the two locations where they feed but our group was so ambitious, we built another two!
Read part I of Zoe's trip here.
Parts III, IV , V and VI are also online.
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