For centuries these strays have been looked after and respected as part of Turkish culture. Now they’ve been dragged into the president’s culture wars.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/30/erdogan-cull-turkey-street-dogs - written by Alexander Christie-Miller

This culture in which street animals are accepted and socialised into urban life has fascinated, enchanted and sometimes repelled visitors to Istanbul for centuries. The colourful lives of the city’s dogs were the subject of a critically acclaimed documentary in 2021, Stray.

Now the Turkish government seems intent on eradicating them with a proposed law that would round up the country’s estimated 4 million stray dogs and cull those that are not adopted within 30 days – almost certainly the vast majority.

“We have a stray dog problem that does not exist in any developed country,” said the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, last month, proposing this “radical solution” to what he said was a dramatic rise in dog population, attacks and rabies cases.

Erdoğan is right, in that it is impossible to imagine this debate occurring in any other developed country – certainly not in Britain, where local authorities can euthanise un-homed stray dogs after seven days, and where bird spikes are installed around city buildings because even pigeon mess is considered economically intolerable.

Turkey, conversely, is perhaps the only country in the world where stray animals have a legal right to inhabit the street, thanks to a 2004 law passed by Erdoğan himself. That law protects a population of socialised street animals whose presence has long served as a proxy for broader social debates about notions of “development” and “civilisation”.

During the Ottoman era, Turks’ solicitude towards animals that shared their urban space was remarked upon in the accounts of almost every European visitor to the country. Dogs were a form of “public property”, wrote the diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, who came to Istanbul in the 1550s and described water troughs and kennels set up on the street, vendors selling scraps of meat for people to feed them, and religious foundations dedicated to their maintenance to which wealthy people left bequests in their wills.

But as the Ottoman empire declined in the face of rival European powers, foreigners and Ottoman reformists alike began to see the dogs as symbolic of a broader backwardness. “How and with what justification can the inhabitants of such a country face the brotherhood of civilised nations?” wrote Abdullah Cevdet, a founding member of the radical reformist Young Turks, in a 1908 article railing against Istanbul’s dogs.

When Cevdet’s movement seized control of the empire shortly afterwards, they enacted the city’s most infamous dog cull, rounding up thousands of them despite bitter resistance in pious Muslim neighbourhoods – where the culture was strongest – and dumping them on an uninhabited island to die a slow death of exposure, hunger and thirst.

Erdoğan’s current proposal is likely to be similarly brutal. In recent years there have been reports around Turkey of municipal officials knocking dogs unconscious and burying them alive, beating them to death with spades, or strangling them with their bare hands.

There is evidence that Turkey’s stray-dog population has grown unsustainably in recent years, with large and sometimes dangerous groups of poorly socialised street dogs roaming the fringes of cities. But the government has made little effort to enact more moderate population control measures, such as neutering campaigns and the routine chipping of pet dogs to discourage pet dumping.

An irony of the debate is that the forces that arrayed for and against the dogs appear to have switched sides. Erdoğan, a would-be champion of Turkey’s Ottoman and Islamic heritage, is being pressured to eliminate them by Islamist and rightwing activists who cast their opponents as metropolitan elites who care more about animal rights than the wellbeing of their fellow citizens.

The dog question has become another flashpoint in Turkey’s culture wars – which is again ironic, because I myself have observed that street-dog culture can be something that brings a community together. It was the dogs who inducted me into Istanbul neighbourhood life and, when volunteering at an animal shelter a few years later, I saw that the people drawn there spanned the gamut of Turkish society.

There is a deeper irony, however, in the notion that sterilising our urban spaces of animals – in Turkey or elsewhere – constitutes progress. The impression of cleanliness it creates is a false one, perpetuating the illusion of a “human” world, discrete and orderly, at a time when our own waste products are killing our ecosystems and poisoning the air we breathe.

Conversely, Turkey’s street-animal culture engenders an awareness that we are part of a broader, nonhuman world that we need to respect and accommodate. Real progress would be to ensure its survival and draw broader lessons from it.