Ioannis Gaitanakis, MSc, MBA, MA, PhD (c)

The Police Chief Who Made the Human–Animal Bond a Shared Responsibility.

It Started With a Loss and Ended With a Mission

I was a child when my beloved dog bit me lightly during play. The physical pain faded within days. What did not fade was what followed. My father, with the best intentions, decided that Rex had to go: he was now "the bad dog that bit my son." For my own good. I never understood that decision. What I understood was the sudden absence, the disappearance of a creature I had loved without conditions, with no explanation and no chance to say goodbye. That broken bond became fear, and that fear hunted me — quietly, faithfully — all the way to the uniform I would one day wear.

For years, on every patrol, I silently adjusted my route to avoid dogs. I never mentioned it, because you do not talk about your fear when you wear a uniform.

My turning point came not through choice but through duty. A call from tourists in a remote Cretan gorge brought me face to face with a dying mother dog trying to shield her puppies. She took her last breath in my arms, and in that moment I experienced what I now call the animal gaze: a final look of absolute trust that I would save her young.

One of those orphaned puppies, Hope, became my constant co-driver in the patrol car. In a matter of weeks, she erased thirty years of fear. Only then did I understand that I had not chosen animal welfare as my path — it had chosen me. From that day on, every animal I encountered was no longer an "object of control" but a living reminder of that gaze in the gorge.

When Tourists Became Our Mirror

My institutional journey into animal welfare did not begin with academic ambitions but with the practical reality of tourist complaints. Crete is a global tourism landmark. Within it, the Municipality of Ierapetra is a complex social ecosystem: 25,000 residents across 551 square kilometres, balancing a semi-urban character, intensive agriculture, and heavy visitor flows. Living alongside an estimated 10,000 companion animals, this density transforms their management from a minor administrative matter into a central challenge for public governance.

In 2011, a foreign tourist came to our station in tears. Her holiday, she said, had been “destroyed” when she saw a dog chained to a barrel beneath the burning sun. What many locals still viewed as tradition appeared to her as cruelty she could not unsee. That complaint exposed what I came to describe as “The Tourists’ Ordeal in Greece.” When cruelty becomes a tourism issue, visitors lose precious days trying to report what they have witnessed — waiting in police stations, missing excursions — and their experience ends in the negative online reviews that quietly damage a country’s image.

Images of starving animals, sick cats around restaurant terraces, and family dogs chained for life beside oil drums function as violent emotional shocks. A trip meant to offer rest becomes a moral injury. When tourists attempt to intervene, their disappointment often deepens: they encounter institutional indifference or are redirected to overstretched local charities locked in permanent tension with the state. Complaints escalate to embassies, prosecutors, and international media. The result is a blow to the destination’s moral image. Through negative word-of-mouth on platforms such as TripAdvisor and social media, private distress is converted into global reputational damage.

In 2010, our municipal police recorded just eight animal-related complaints over an entire year. Today, we handle more than five hundred annually, roughly twenty per cent of them originating from tourists. This rise does not mean that cruelty has suddenly appeared. It means that, slowly, people began to believe that someone would finally listen. I decided to build a service worthy of that belief.

Empowering the Duty of Care

I wanted to understand why foreign visitors experienced what we considered “normal” as an intolerable ethical shock. That question pushed me from fieldwork into formal inquiry. I became the first uniformed officer in Greece to complete a master’s degree in animal welfare, ethics, and the law, and I am currently completing my doctorate at the Hellenic Mediterranean University.

My doctoral work explores how visible cruelty damages the moral image of a destination and under what conditions animal-friendly tourism can emerge as a viable model. Concepts such as positive animal welfare — virtually unknown in my community a few years ago — have begun to enter local and institutional dialogue. Ierapetra has ceased to be merely a point on the map; it has become a living laboratory in which scientific insight is translated into operating procedure. We no longer rely solely on instinct. We rely on statistics, case data, and trends.

When No One Owns the Chain, Nothing Gets Done

In Greece, animal legislation often lacks an “architect of implementation.” Responsibilities are fragmented: municipalities manage strays, the national police deal with owned animals, charities cover education and adoptions. The result is a broken chain in which everyone holds one link but no one owns the entire process. Of the country’s 332 municipalities, 174 do not even have a municipal police force, which means that in nearly half of Greece the law is, in practice, a dead letter.

In Ierapetra, we chose a different path. Our Municipal Police operate with what I would call an out-of-the-box philosophy that has made us an early prototype of what a future dedicated animal police force might look like. Inspired by all-in-one animal care and control agencies in North America, we transformed ourselves from a simple enforcement unit into a vertical hub of animal protection.

Our three-officer team now covers the full spectrum. Operationally, we allocate tasks through a strategic matching of each incident’s nature to each officer’s psychological profile and specialised skills. Whilst all team members are fully cross-trained, we leverage individual strengths: an officer with advanced de-escalation capabilities leads in volatile human conflicts, whilst the scanning and handling of potentially aggressive animals falls to the member with the deepest expertise in canine behaviour. We respond to complaints, collect stray and injured animals, conduct rescues during natural disasters, provide veterinary care, support wildlife rehabilitation when needed, and supervise the entire process through to adoption. We maintain detailed statistics on every case — 4,007 animal welfare files between 2010 and 2025 — which feed back into our research, prevention campaigns, and training programmes.

Since 2017, animal-related cases have become the top item on our operational agenda, surpassing traditional duties such as traffic control, sanitation, and public-space enforcement. By 2025, they accounted for approximately forty-two per cent of our annual workload. This structure allows us to assist roughly 2,100 animals per year, directly or indirectly. In 2025, the Greek Ministry of Interior ranked the Municipal Police of Ierapetra as the leading municipal police service in the country, awarding us a Distinction of Excellence based on citizen satisfaction and performance indicators.

At the same time, we apply the principle of soft policing. We go door to door in remote villages, sit with elderly farmers, hunters, and shepherds, listen to their concerns, and build trust rather than engineer confrontation. Our real strength lies in co-ordinating a wide network of local volunteers who serve as an extension of the service on the ground.

The Cost of Leaving Animals Out of the Plan

Crisis management in Greece suffers from a serious blind spot: animals are nearly invisible in official civil protection plans. This is not merely an ethical omission. It creates direct risks to human safety. Time and again, we see owners and volunteers rushing into evacuation zones to rescue animals, placing their own lives and those of firefighters and rescue workers in jeopardy.

In Ierapetra, we have attempted to reverse this by applying a one-resilience approach, integrating animals into every phase of our emergency work: before, during, and after.

Before — Prevention and Planning

We never wait for a fire to start. Using GIS mapping, we identify farms, shelters, and high-risk areas in advance, so that we know where animals are likely to be trapped before a crisis unfolds. We advocate for universal microchipping, ensuring that reunions after a disaster remain possible. And we systematically combat permanent chaining — which is, in a wildfire, a death sentence for any dog left behind.

During — Operational Response

When disaster strikes, our team is on the front line. We help free tethered animals, deploy drones to locate those trapped in burned terrain, and integrate volunteers into a co-ordinated, safe framework rather than allowing them to act in isolation. We simultaneously seize animals in immediate danger and open criminal cases for abandonment where the law permits.

After — Recovery and Accountability

Recovery is not simply a matter of rebuilding houses. We assist in reuniting lost animals with their families, but we also apply a firm rule: no animal is returned to someone who deliberately abandoned or neglected it. In such cases, we order permanent removal and ensure that offenders are entered into the national registry of animal abuse violators. A community that includes animals in its safety architecture is ultimately a community that protects its own future.

Shared Responsibility Must Be Taught

I believe that real policing begins with education. In the training sessions I conduct for officers of the Hellenic Police and other municipal forces, initial reactions are often sceptical. Animal welfare is seen as a secondary matter beside “serious” crime. The turning point comes when we discuss “The Link” — the body of evidence connecting animal abuse with domestic violence and other serious offences. Once officers grasp this, protecting animals ceases to be a soft add-on and becomes a tool for preventing harm to people as well.

At the community level, our ASPIDA school programme — aspida being the Greek word for “shield” — introduces children to responsible guardianship under the motto “I Love with Rules.” Pupils become the most effective eyes of the service in every neighbourhood, alerting us to chained, stray, or abused animals. Combined with continuous information campaigns and targeted inspections, this work has helped Ierapetra achieve one of the highest rates of electronic identification (EMZS) of companion animals in Greece.

A National Architecture for a Shared Responsibility

All of these experiences have led me to a conclusion that is simple in its formulation but radical in its implications: countries like mine need an integrated animal police architecture. For Greece, I propose the creation of an independent animal police authority with a vertical structure, modelled on successful all-in-one agencies in North America.

Such an authority would consolidate investigations, field control, and criminal casework under a single roof. It would oversee the entire chain from collection and veterinary care through to shelter monitoring and adoption. It would implement educational programmes at a national scale. And it would ensure that animals are formally included in national crisis management protocols — so that no owner is ever forced to choose between obeying an evacuation order and saving a companion.

The experience in Ierapetra demonstrates that when these functions are united, they cease to be an administrative burden and become instruments of public safety, public health, and ethical governance. The Ierapetra Municipal Police Model is not a local curiosity. It is a modular blueprint that can be adapted elsewhere.

I began this journey as an officer who feared dogs. A mother dog in a gorge, a small puppy named Hope, and thousands of citizens who chose to trust a small municipal police department changed that. I did not set out to make animals my mission. But once they did, I came to understand that a society which protects its most vulnerable members — human or not — is a society that preserves its own dignity and culture..

Ioannis Gaitanakis, MSc, MBA, MA, PhD(c), is Head of the Municipal Police of Ierapetra, Crete, officially ranked as the top-performing municipal force in Greece in 2025. A pioneer in animal welfare governance, he is the first uniformed officer in the country to hold an MA in Animal Welfare, Ethics, and Law, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the Hellenic Mediterranean University, where his research examines Moral Destination Image and how animal cruelty affects tourism. He serves as a national instructor for the Hellenic Police and the National Centre for Public Administration (EKDDA), and is the author of Companion Animals – Dog Bites: Understanding, Prevention, and Management of Aggressive Behaviour. He is the architect of the “Ierapetra Model,” a practical blueprint for integrated animal protection, public safety, and community resilience.