The clip shows people rushing to help an older woman knocked over by one of the many stray dogs on Istanbul’s streets. It is the kind of canine run-in that plays continuously on Turkey’s social media.
The anger these clips spark is part of a growing furor pitting Turks who have lost patience with aggressive strays against people sympathetic to the homeless dogs’ plight.
Fed up with attacks by stray hounds, campaigners have convinced the government to draw up legislation aimed at curbing the number of strays.
Photo: Reuters
“We want streets without dogs” is one popular slogan.
However, the plan has provoked an outcry from animal rights activists because of the measures it proposes.
The bill, which is expected to be put to parliament soon, calls for the homeless animals to be captured en masse before being sterilized and spayed.
Finally, if the stray is not adopted within 30 days, it would be put down.
In the face of a stray dog population the government says has reached 4 million, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday said the nation needed “to move on to more radical measures.”
“We have a problem with stray dogs that does not exist in any developed country,” he said, citing an increase in rabies cases and dog-related traffic incidents.
The WHO has classified Turkey as a “high risk” country for rabies, and the government says dogs caused 3,544 road accidents over the past five years, killing 55 people and injuring more than 5,000.
Critics say that the bill would lead to a massacre under the guise of putting dogs down, while a protest in Istanbul against the plan was to be held yesterday.
Animal rights activists say the measures bring back memories of an Ottoman-era tragedy.
In 1910, an estimated 60,000 strays captured in Istanbul were sent to the deserted Hayirsizada rock in the middle of Turkey’s Sea of Marmara. With nothing else to eat, the dogs tore each other to pieces.
Animal Rights Federation of Turkey vice president Haydar Ozkan said in the online news site Gazete Duvar that the government should learn from the tragedy and instead prioritize effective sterilization and animal shelters.
“There are no shelters in 1,100 of Turkey’s 1,394 municipalities,” Ozkan said, adding that the few that do exist do not have the means to sterilize dogs themselves.
A law in effect since 2021 requires the country’s municipalities to build shelters, with the deadline for their completion varying according to the size of the community, but the resources allocated for their construction are too meagre, activists say.
In the face of the growing controversy, Turkish Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Ibrahim Yumakli said that “it is possible to control the proliferation of stray dogs by sterilizing 70 percent of them every year.”
However, he added that on average only 260,000 strays were sterilized a year over the past five years — far too few to make an impact.
Mindful of Turkey’s reputation abroad, Erdogan said those numbers showed that “past methods have not brought a solution.”
“This issue must be resolved as quickly as possible to make the streets safe for everyone, especially children,” he said.
The Turkish Veterinary Association is opposed to any plans for putting strays down, saying that it was not consulted.
“Killing is not a solution. The dog population could be reduced in a short time with effective sterilization,” it said in a statement.
Meanwhile, people worried about the number of strays trade horror stories, like that of a young girl left with severe bite marks after being attacked by a dog in Ankara.
A tourist with the handle @Franck1936 wrote on X that he gave up on cycling across Turkey because of dogs attacking his wheels.
“Cycling makes them crazy,” he said.
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