 Often we are asked why we send so many dogs to foreign countries to be rehomed there.
Many people and organizations object against this practice, saying that this just transfers the problem, is no long term solution and takes needed space from the shelter dogs in the respective country.
We must say that we do not see the export of dogs as our main purpose nor our long term goal.
We do feel that this practice has some drawbacks.
But because we are asked quite often here are our thoughts regarding the arguments above:
First, in contrary to shelter dogs in northern or western Europe the dogs in Greece do not have any lobby at all.
A stay in a british dog shelter for example feels like five star holidays for our inmates!
If we do not care for them, nobody does. The government gives out new laws in an amazing frequency but otherwise denies any responsibilty when it comes to acting for the dogs.
Second, we operate with shelters who guarantee that our dogs do not take up space needed by others. In fact, f.e. in Germany there is a need for dogs. Problem dogs ho stay long are mainly tose so-called "fighting dogs" while others are easily and quickly rehomed. This means that our dogs are in no way a burden to the shelters or to the overall situation in the respective country.
Of course this goes only as long as not all the world sends their dogs to western Europe. However, currently this is not the case.
Third and most important - at the moment there is no alternative.
We can not extend the shelter that we have and if we could we couldn't finance it.
If we stop sending dogs out this means that
- either the dogs stay in our shelter forever and we'd have to stop tomorrow taking new dogs in. This would mean certain death to hundreds of dogs in the near future.
- Or we keep taking in new dogs. In this case we'd have to put the old ones to sleep after a while to have the necessary space.
 In fact, this has been proposed by local "Animal friends" but then: Why should we take in dogs, clean their wounds, vaccinate them, feed them well just to kill them after a while? This is by no means an alternative for us!
Thus, since there is apparently no other solution, and only for this reason, we keep on sending dogs abroad.
This is not our main goal, it will never be and we hope that through our neutering campaigns we will be able to stop or at least reduce this in the future!
How we rehome
Only in exceptional cases we give dogs to private persons. The reason for this is that we can not easily control the new homes and secure that the dogs will actually lead a better life.
Instead, we work with various shelters in Germany that we personally visited or where we have reliable contacts with the responsible persons and that ensure that every new owner is checked before and - even more important - after the rehoming.
Partly our partners of Samos Hilfe take over this task.
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