Stray dog

Photo by Özgür Öğret

A stray dog in central Istanbul.

Veterinarians in Turkey are expressing unease about a harsh new law for managing the country's vast stray dog population, predicting it could see hordes of the animals either killed or left to rot in ill-equipped, overcrowded shelters.

Practitioners also worry about being pressured into euthanizing healthy or treatable dogs, forcing a choice between upholding their oath to care for animals or facing punishment from their superiors and the government, judging from interviews with seven veterinarians and veterinary technicians in Turkey who spoke to the VIN News Service.

"We are people with consciences," said a young veterinarian in the western province of Çanakkale, talking on condition of anonymity while he grapples with the rule's implications for the profession — and his own future. "I believe many veterinarians would resign from their jobs" if forced to engage in "mass killings of dogs," he said.

Acute concerns for the welfare of Turkey's millions of stray dogs have been brewing since May, when state media reported the ruling administration of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was drafting legislation to have them rounded up and, if not adopted within 30 days, euthanized. Supporters contended the move was necessary to prevent dogs from attacking humans, causing car accidents and spreading rabies.

After the plan, widely dubbed "the massacre law," sparked a public outcry at home and abroad, the government softened it ahead of its eventual approval by Turkey's parliament on July 30. Now in force, the law dictates that all strays be put in shelters "as quickly as possible." It states that dogs should be euthanized if they "pose a danger to the life and health of humans and animals, have uncontrollable negative behaviors, have contagious or incurable diseases or are prohibited from being owned." (Some dog breeds, such as pit bulls, are banned in Turkey).

Many veterinarians fear the dogs' outlook remains bleak, in part because a lack of shelter capacity could encourage widespread disregard for the stated welfare safeguards. More broadly, they say, negative political rhetoric is fostering a climate of hostility toward strays that emboldens people to kill them, often brutally.

"Dogs will either die in isolation and misery or be killed with various excuses," said Dr. Bilsay Kanat, chair of the Free Veterinarians Association, an Istanbul-based nongovernmental organization founded by practitioners. Provisions in the law to protect healthy or unaggressive dogs from slaughter, Kanat maintains, are "open to interpretation."

In the two months or so since the law went into effect, reports have surfaced of strays being killed systematically. Authorities in the municipalities of Niğde in central Turkey and Altındağ in the capital Ankara, for instance, are investigating two animal shelters after large numbers of dead dogs and even cats were found either buried or lying uncovered on their properties. Both shelters have denied accusations of criminal conduct, maintaining the animals were killed either in accordance with the new law or, in the case of the Niğde shelter, brought there dead because it has an animal cemetery. In Turkey's west, the bodies of about a dozen dogs were reportedly found in sacks at a garbage dump. Separately, three dead dogs found beside a highway reportedly were suspected to have been killed by some form of injection since syringes were found stuck in their bodies.

Even if enough shelters are built to accommodate captured strays, keeping them in captivity for prolonged periods is unrealistic, according to Ezgi Akçaz, a former shelter technician who worked in the western province of Izmir for five years. "It's not possible to take care of a dog [in a shelter] for 10 years," said Akçaz, who left the job four months ago. "It wouldn't survive anyway."

The Turkish Veterinary Medical Association (TVMA), the country's chief representative body for the profession, confirmed to VIN News that it remains illegal to kill healthy animals that pose no danger to humans. "Nevertheless, there are going to be veterinarians pressured to euthanize dogs," the association's chairperson, Dr. Gülay Ertürk, said.

Loved and loathed: The checkered history of Turkey's strays

An abundance of stray cats and dogs has been a fact of life throughout Turkey for centuries. Cats were vaunted during Ottoman times, in part, for their perceived cleanliness. To this day, felines help control rats and mice, especially in big, densely packed cities like Istanbul and Ankara. A prevailing fondness for felines in Turkey is demonstrated in the 2016 documentary Kedi, which tracks the lives of seven cats on the streets of Istanbul.

Regard toward dogs has been mixed. Strays were abundant and seemingly well cared for during Ottoman times. In a book about Istanbul published in 1836, the Irish clergyman Robert Walsh recounted, "[S]mall reservoirs of water are placed at intervals on the streets, and butchers and bakers are appointed to supply [stray dogs] with meat and bread." In 1867, Mark Twain observed "dogs sleep in the streets, all over the city."

During the dying decades of the Ottoman Empire, however, an association between strays and disease and disorder firmed in some quarters, according to a paper by the Turkish historian Cihangir Gündoğdu. Mounting discontent culminated in the infamous "Hayırsızada massacre" of 1910, the paper notes, during which thousands of stray dogs in Istanbul were rounded up and exiled to the uninhabited island of Sivriada, where they were left to die of thirst and starvation.

The city's stray population recovered and continued to grow, as it did elsewhere. Today, that seemingly inherent desire among many Turks to care for strays observed by Walsh almost 200 years ago lingers. Locals regularly feed stray dogs and, according to a recent article in The Guardian, have even banded together to pay for their veterinary treatment. A prevailing bond between Istanbul's residents and strays is rendered in the 2013 documentary Taşkafa.

The new stray dog law marks a dramatic turnaround from national legislation introduced in 2004 that prohibited the killing of strays. Under that previous law, municipal governments were required to vaccinate, neuter and microchip strays before releasing them back to where they were found. Municipalities didn't always have the budget or desire to carry out their duties amid lax enforcement by the central government, the TVMA's Ertürk said. Such inconsistency meant that even municipalities that diligently treated dogs faced an uphill battle because strays, which can travel around 20 kilometers (12½ miles) in a single day, could pour into their territory from communities where strays were poorly managed.

That apparent slipshod adherence to the previous law coincided with some widely publicized incidents involving attacks by dogs on humans. They reportedly include a mentally ill man being killed by a pack of dogs in Istanbul this August, an elderly woman being attacked and injured in the province of Muş last December, and a 10-year-old child dying from rabies caused by a dog bite in the eastern province of Bitlis in late 2022.

"Our nation wants us to solve this problem," President Erdoğan told parliament in late May. "Our people want the streets to be safe. Our children want to go to school [and] play in the park in peace."

Tagged stray dog

Photo by Özgür Öğret

Under an earlier law, stray dogs in Turkey were neutered, vaccinated and microchipped, then released to where they were found. To track which dogs had been previously captured, strays were tagged like this one shown in central Istanbul.

Facilities, budgets to enforce law don't exist, practitioners say

The exact number of stray dogs in Turkey is unknown, with estimates ranging from 2.7 million to 4 million, said Ertürk. Whatever the figure, it far outnumbers the capacity of the country's 322 shelters, which can hold about 105,000 animals, she said.

The new law compels municipalities to build the necessary shelters by 2028 under penalty of up to two years in prison. Currently, most of Turkey's around 1,400 municipalities lack sufficient shelter capacity, according to Dr. Cihat Ayar, a veterinarian in the eastern province of Van and municipal board member. "The primary problem is this: The law requires every municipality with a population of 25,000 or above to build an animal care house," Ayar said. "There is nothing like this at present. There is no infrastructure for this law to be followed."

Akçaz, the former shelter technician, suspects municipalities that hadn't adequately funded neutering, medicines and food, won't put enough money into building and maintaining shelters, either. "This is a problem which everybody talks about behind closed doors but [is] never solved," she said.

Since the law went into effect, shelters have been dutifully holding onto strays, according to Dr. Furkan Kamburoğlu Mercan in the western Ayvalık district. "The authorities do not release the animals [unless] they are chipped and owned by the person who brought them in," Mercan said.

A veterinarian employed by a shelter in eastern Turkey, who requested anonymity because he didn't want to anger his employer, confirmed the shelter is filling up fast and lamented the rule change. "The citizens would know that the animal was being cared for," he said. Now, he, too, fears unclaimed animals will start being euthanized. "This is not an environment to practice medicine."

Ertürk believes the shelter shortfall will tempt municipalities to kill dogs in large numbers. And even if there were enough room, she said, dogs could become candidates for euthanasia if poor conditions make them sick or aggressive. "They will fight. They will get sick. They will hurt each other," Ertürk said. "Observing animals in such a state with the inability to help would devastate the human psyche."

Cramming animals together would allow disease to spread like wildfire, according to Akçaz. "One sick animal in such a crowd would have a bomb-like effect on the others," she said. "This would be mass killing, in my opinion."

What would be the ideal solution?

Ertürk and other veterinarians are pinning hopes on efforts launched in August by Turkey's main opposition party to persuade the country's Constitutional Court to revoke the law. Municipalities controlled by opposition parties, she notes, aren't aggressively collecting stray dogs as they await the high court's decision.

Although the veterinarians interviewed accept strays pose problems, they would like to see a reversion to returning the dogs to where they live following neutering and vaccination, along with more money to fund the activity.

"There is an uncontrolled excessive population increase [of dogs] at the moment," Ayar said. "The solution is not euthanasia. The solution is a nationwide neutering campaign."

Ertürk agrees, adding that animals that develop threatening gang behavior should be caught and taken to care centers for rehabilitation.

Strays that need to be kept in captivity, Mercan and Ayar said, ideally would be kept in natural habitats where they can roam and receive humane care. If kept in shelters, they said, dogs could be grouped by breed, age and aggressiveness and given adequate space to move and exposure to friendly human interaction.

Another factor that feeds into the stray problem is people losing their dogs or abandoning them with impunity. Akçaz said Turkey in 2022 introduced mandatory microchipping but, even faced with penalties, people are still failing to chip their pets or throwing them to the streets, likely because law enforcement is lax. Mercan estimated that, despite the law, only around 7% of dogs are chipped in Turkey.

"Everything is solvable if scientific methods that are proven to be effective are practiced actively, and in a lasting way," Kanat said. "The stray animals themselves are not the problem. The problem is that they're not getting access to health services."

— Ross Kelly contributed to this story.

All interviews were conducted in Turkish and translated into English by the author.