By Terry Smith
What do a small newspaper in southeast Ohio, an uninhabitable island in Greece, a college-town legal-aid attorney, a pet-rescue organization in London, and a family of mixed-breed dogs have in common?
They all had roles in an adventure that transpired in the Corinth Gulf of Greece last weekend, and perhaps more importantly, they're the latest proof of why the phrase "the power of the Internet" is much more than just a cliché.
Through the Worldwide Web, the locally focused Athens NEWS and an Athens legal-aid attorney had roles in triggering an international rescue operation that plucked six abandoned mutts off a deserted Greek island last Saturday.
The simplest way to tell this story is chronologically, so let's start at the beginning.
June 26: The Athens NEWS received a letter to the editor via e-mail from Tim Munton, a South African who lives on Evia Island off Greece's east coast. He had been sailing in the Corinth Gulf. (This body of water is located between Greece's mainland and the Pelloponnese to the south, and is the main shipping channel between Athens and the Ionian Sea and the Mediterranean.) In his letter, Munton said that while sailing, he and his companion(s) came across five abandoned dogs on a tiny group of uninhabited islands called Nisoi Alkonidhes. Munton wrote that the island where he found the dogs, Dhaskalio, has no fresh water, and that in spite of this, the dogs seemed in reasonable condition. They apparently had been eating sea gulls and their eggs, as well as fish.
Munton said he left 25 liters of water in a large plastic container and painted a sign on a wall to ask visiting boats to please give the dogs more water. Munton requested that The Athens News publish his letter, as a way of generating some help for the abandoned, waterless dogs.
http://www.athensnews.com/news/local/2008/jul/10/letter-editor-sparks-international-dog-rescue/
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