When I step out of my apartment in central Istanbul, dogs surround me. One lies dozing across the street. Another has sad eyes that are always looking for food, sympathy or both. They haunt city squares, they wait outside butchers and coffee shops. Some seem unhealthily overweight; others are skeletal.
Living in Turkey has for decades, even centuries, meant navigating the stray dogs. There are around four million of them, according to some estimates, but it’s hard to know for sure. For many people they are inseparable from the idea of Turkey itself.
Though maybe not for much longer. Just over a week ago, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party presented a bill to Parliament that would require municipalities to capture strays and put them in shelters. (Many of those shelters are dilapidated and overcrowded. The bill gives municipalities until 2028 to renovate existing shelters and build new ones.) Aggressive, rabid and ill dogs will be euthanized.
There has been fierce debate and protests over the fate of stray dogs since Mr. Erdogan proposed “radical” measures in a speech in May. Supporters of what came to be known as Mr. Erdogan’s “euthanasia bill” point to car accidents and injuries caused by the dogs. They say that streets are not suitable homes for dogs, and that their presence makes cities more dangerous for humans and animals alike. Critics of the plan, myself included, argue for sterilization instead of euthanasia. We also fear the worst: that beloved dogs we’ve looked after for months or years might suddenly disappear because an overanxious citizen placed an anonymous call.
I also can’t shake the sense that for the government this is not really about the dogs. Mr. Erdogan long ago mastered the art of scapegoating — in his more than 20 years in power he has pointed to intellectuals, journalists, refugees and others as the source of Turkey’s troubles. With the economy faltering, and after a poor showing in spring municipal elections, he and his party have again been looking for somewhere to redirect people’s ire.
In March the opposition won in many major cities, including Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Antalya. Before that election, reports in pro-government media had diagnosed “the terror of stray dogs” as one of the reasons for the governing party’s decreasing popularity. Stray dogs, the reports said, were intimidating people, and the lax response by Mr. Erdogan and his party had angered voters enough that they would punish them at the ballot box.
It’s true that the stray population causes problems: Some dogs are rabid, and they do attack and cause accidents. A couple of years ago, a 9-year-old girl who was being chased by stray dogs died after she was run over by a truck in southern Turkey. There have been many attempts in the past to reduce their numbers — most infamously, in the early 20th century, when thousands were dumped on a barren island and left to die.
From what I saw, though, the spring election was driven by more than stray animals. People were focused on questions including how to pay rent and feed themselves and their families in a country with one of the highest rates of inflation in the world (about 71 percent according to the government; about 113 percent according to outside economists). Meat prices have more than doubled since last year and some 40 percent of people cannot afford to eat a meal with meat, chicken or fish every other day. The minimum Turkish pension is a miserly $377, even after a recent increase, and I regularly see people in my middle-class neighborhood pick food out of the trash.
In the weeks after the election, one lawmaker from the governing party posted a photo of a lobster she was about to enjoy in Monaco on social media. Another posted about his trip to the Maldives.
But sure. People are probably mostly angry about the dogs.
When I was a teenager in the 1990s, my mother would send me out to feed street dogs before bed. This love and concern for strays was a tradition even in the Ottoman era. Mark Twain navigated the city by observing the dogs. He wrote that he knew he was off the main streets when he saw dogs that “sleep placidly and keep no watch. They would not move, though the sultan himself passed by.”
Over the past week, people took to the streets in Istanbul, Izmir and other cities to protest the bill. Some carried huge banners that read, “We’re not shutting up, we’re not afraid, we’re not handing you our friends.” I’ve rarely seen Turks this united against a bill. Critics hope to stop the measure by organizing more protest marches.
For my part, I hope Turkey’s stray dogs stay — outside my apartment, at the entrance of my favorite coffee shop, and elsewhere in Istanbul’s neighborhoods where you can see water and food left out on each corner. As long as these animals wander freely on Turkey’s streets, surviving on scraps and random acts of kindness, they are a quiet rebuke to a government immersed in its elite pomposities and increasingly disconnected from reality.
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