ATHENS – The rotting carcasses of about 75 percent of the 245,000 animals drowned in Greece’s massive floods have been taken out of the infected waters as the clean-up continued.

Deputy Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Evangelos Tournas gave the numbers to Parliament in response to a question from Sailing to Freedom party leader Zoi Konstantopoulou about progress in the effort.

He said the Agricultural Development Ministry has “registered the losses and gone ahead to remove, bury or cremate dead animals. Some 110,000 dead animals and 135,000 poultry have been registered as lost,” reported the state-run Athens-Macedonia News Agency AMNA.

He said the remainder are still in stagnant waters and a health hazard and that farmers have claimed far more than than found, the New Democracy government providing subsidies for losses.

The floods he said killed “110,000 animals compared to 1.7 million registered and declared in the region of Thessaly. In other words, only 7 percent of animals were lost in Thessaly, and, of course, a much lower number of them compared to the total national number.”

Minister of Rural Development and Food Lefteris Avgenakis said the numbers reported to the Hellenic Agricultural Insurance Organization (ELGA) included 61,786 sheep and goats, 19,355 pigs, 5,306 cattle, and 123,810 birds.

In a bid to rebalance the ecology in northern Greece along the Evros River on Turkey’s border, hunting has been banned for five years to help the area recover from summer wildfires.

The Environment and Energy Ministry issued the order to the Forestry Directorate of Evros to create conditions for the protection, reproduction, and development of wildlife but it wasn’t said how, or if, it would be enforced.

The fires burned some 962,000 stremmata (961,998 acres) in the area that is a fertile green place and with the Dadia National Forest that suffered damage, and the fires also killed 18 refugees in the woods.