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I first came to Turkey in 1980 and was always upset by the sight of
frightened dogs wandering the streets and of their dead bodies littering
Istanbul’s roads. However I only became actively involved with stray
dogs in 1996 when my company, Futura Tekstil, moved to new premises in
Beylikduzu. There were several stray dogs living in and around our new
factory compound. Like any responsible factory owner I of course took
these dogs to a vet, had them vaccinated, neutered and treated and
instructed our employees to feed them. Unfortunately one of our dogs,
Sunny, was too heavily pregnant to be aborted and gave birth to 4
puppies. (Sunny and her 2 surviving puppies now live at my house near
Sapanca. The two other puppies and one of the fathers, Korsan, died
recently – Korsan at the ripe old age for a Rottweiler of 13 years).
It started to dawn on me that if every factory owner in Istanbul, every
business proprietor, every bekci of blocks of flats, every administrator
of ‘sites’, followed my example and neutered and cared for his local
stray dogs, the street dog problem in Istanbul would soon be solved.
This realisation motivated me to found SHKD 8 years ago.
SHKD’s aim therefore is to implement "Neuter & Return" in Istanbul and
surrounding areas as a solution to the city’s stray dog problem. Having
first made donations to other animal welfare groups I realized that
these groups had no overall strategy.
I first visited many international animal welfare charities and the
World Health Organization in order to study the dog problem and how to
solve it. I was amazed to discover that no Turkish politicians and no
senior officials had apparently studied the problem, or if they had,
they certainly had not done anything about it.
Since at least Ottoman times the authorities in Istanbul have been
trying to rid the city of stray dogs by poisoning, by removing them to
Hayirsiz island to starve to death, by shooting them and by even more
hideous methods of extermination. Still the city is full of dogs. Still
you see their dead bodies on Turkish roads. Still they cause road
accidents.
Isn’t it high time for a re-think ?
"Neuter & Return" seemed so obvious and logical to me that I naively
expected the municipalities of Istanbul to embrace it if SHKD showed
them the way, by implementing it in certain areas near our shelter in
Gokturk. We soon however discovered that officials and politicians are
usually too disinterested or too prejudiced against dogs to do anything
other than blindly and sporadically continue killing.
8 years later, despite neutering and vaccinating over 20,000 dogs in
Istanbul, despite many visits to mayors and politicians, and despite the
heroic efforts of Perihan Agnelli of F.H.D.D. in Fethiye who has been
tenaciously lobbying in Ankara on behalf of "Neuter & Return", and
despite the chief vet of Istanbul Buyuksehir Belediye assuring us he
agrees with our "Neuter & Return" strategy, we are still waiting for it
to be adopted as official government policy.
We hope it will be included in the implementation rules of the recent
animal welfare law. The next step would be to persuade the Istanbul
Municipality that N&R must be implemented by motivated NGOs such as
SHKD, EDHKD and FHDD rather than by the same poorly motivated municipal
workers who currently sporadically kill the most approachable dogs.
"Neuter & Return", as SHKD has demonstrated in Gokturk and many other
suburbs and villages around Istanbul, has to be implemented in the
manner of a military campaign and the trust of animal lovers has to be
won, so that they voluntarily bring their dogs to clinics for free
neutering and vaccination, rather than hiding them from us, as they do
at the moment from municipal death squads. The current practice of
municipalities catching dogs and dumping them in other areas must also
be stopped. Individual municipalities cannot solve the problem on their
own; it must be solved by the Buyuksehir Belediye on an Istanbul-wide
scale, with coordinated collection, neutering, vaccination and return of
dogs. Hence our motto:
Kisirlastir – Asilat – Yasat : Neuter – Vaccinate –
Let Live
Robert Smith
March 10th 2006.
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