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.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
RSS