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 stray dogs. There are around four million of them, 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. In July 2024, 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 Erdogan proposed “radical” measures in May 2024. Supporters of what came to be known as Erdogan’s “euthanasia bill” point to car accidents and injuries caused by 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 argue for sterilization instead of euthanasia. We also fear the worst: that beloved dogs we have looked after for months or years might suddenly disappear because an overanxious citizen placed an anonymous call.
I also cannot shake the sense that for the government, this is not really about the dogs. 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 2024, the opposition won in many major cities, including Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Antalya. Before that election, pro-government media 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 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.
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.”
People have started to protest the proposed law in the streets in Istanbul, Izmir and other cities. Some carried huge banners that read, “We are not shutting up, we are not afraid, we are not handing you our friends.” I have 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.