Bars on foreign exchange transactions affect food supplies to zoos
that replaces the termites they would eat in the wild.
A gaggle of delighted toddlers watched as the two large creatures snacked on some worms. The zoo, under the slogan “we stay together during tough times,” is offering free entry to children this summer on weekdays.
But Lesueur has had to increase ticket prices for adults after tax rises took effect this week as part of tough reforms demanded by Greece’s creditors as Athens seeks a bailout worth up to 86 billion euros ($94 billion) over three years.
In a park in central Athens, Cordelia Madden-Kanellopoulou looked down and exclaimed to a black cat at her feet: “Hello beauty, who are you?”
The feline was a new addition to the group that the Englishwoman, who is married to a Greek, feeds along with other volunteers from the charity Nine Lives. Their members, many of them elderly Athens residents, feed around 450 stray cats in the Greek capital.
“What we really see more are pedigree cats being dumped,” Madden-Kanellopoulou explained over a chorus of plaintive mewing. “A few years ago there really was money in Greece — people started buying these expensive cats, like Persians. Now they cannot face the costs, or they don’t want to — the vet, the grooming — so they dump them.”
With a quarter of the population unemployed, few Greeks want to adopt abandoned cats. The charity relies “quite a bit on expats,” Madden-Kanellopoulou said as she reached into a bag of cat food. “But with the crisis, more and more of those leave Greece.”
Strays are a common sight in this country. Loukanikos, a sandycoloured stray dog whose name means ‘sausage’, became an unofficial mascot to anti-austerity riots in Athens in 2010 as he charged alongside protesters.
Evgenia Mataragka, of the charity Animal Action Greece, said she had seen a “huge increase” in the number of abandoned pets over the last six months.
“In big cities they do not starve usually,” she said. “But on the islands, especially for the cats, it is difficult. Once the tourists are gone, many die of starvation.” Others get poisoned when they eat things they shouldn’t, she added.
The cats are not neutered, said Mataragka, contributing to an explosion in the stray population.
Both Nine Lives and Animal Action Greece are increasingly turning to foreign donors. “In Greece we all have problems. Nobody can help,” said Mataragka. —