GELLERMAN: At the Hellenic Animal Welfare Society’s shelter near Athens’ new international airport, there are a few cats and hundreds of dogs. Many are mutts, some have pedigrees says Society Director Lianna Alexandri.

ALEXANDRI: There are all stray dogs and three are cats. We collect these dogs from the streets, from the roads. Almost before they come here, they’re dead. Some of them are really skeletons. They walk like skeletons, you see, because if they’re outside. You see, it’s a tremendous problem.

GELLERMAN: Now, by law, stray dogs are captured, nursed back to health, neutered and returned to the streets they came from. Euthanizing healthy animals is forbidden in Greece, but over the past year, mysteriously, three thousand dogs have been found murdered on the streets of Athens.

STELAS: A great number of stray dogs were found poisoned. We don’t know who was responsible, we never found anyone. Some people say this is the neighborhood, the bad neighborhood, the bad restaurant. Some other people believe it was the municipalities. But we can’t prove anything, and we’re not certain exactly what happened.

[MAN SPEAKING IN GREEK]

GELLERMAN: Vasilios Stelas, Greece’s general administrator for animal welfare, denies the government had anything to do with the poisonings and doesn’t know who did. But looking forward, he says, what really is needed is a change in attitude among Greeks to make them more responsible dog owners. The Greek Olympic Committee had its own attitude toward strays change. Originally, when the Hellenic Animal Welfare Society asked the committee to cooperate with their abandoned dog program, they refused. But then, last summer, strays overran the venues for the Olympic test events preventing Athens from competing. The Olympic Committee called in the welfare society which captured 62 stray dogs, neutered them, and placed them in a shelter until the test events were over.

GELLERMAN: Oh, look at him.

ALEXANDRI: He has a broken leg also. It’s very nice. We have very nice strays.

GELERMAN: Oh, look at him.

[DOG WHIMPERING]

ALEXANDRI: It’s a very nice dog. How can it survive?

GELLERMAN: Well, Athens may have its fill of dogs but some animals are gone forever. Consider the Great Auk. The Great Auk was the original penguin. Long before actual penguins were discovered the Welsh gave that name which means white head to these stately birds of the north Atlantic. And indeed Great Auks did closely resemble penguins in their body, shape, and lifestyle. In the latest installment in our series, “A Gap in Nature,” Tim Flannery tells the story of the bird’s demise.

[MUSIC]