Dogs of Istanbul at heart of political storm as app leads to killings - in pictures

Street dogs are prevalent across Turkey but have become a polarising topic after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said they should be in shelters and an app allowed users to report the location of stray animals

A woman strokes a stray dog in front of Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, on August 23, 2022. - As indelible to Istanbul as its mosques, street dogs have been swept up in a political storm involving President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and an app that helped get them killed. The sheer number of stray animals -- dogs and cats both -- darting between people and lounging on public squares jumps out at most visitors to Turkey's ancient cultural capital. (Photo by Yasin AKGUL / AFP)

The animals could well be descendants of the dogs glorified in the first grainy photos of the city, in which they roam in packs near landmarks such as the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque.

Ekrem Isin, who wrote 'The Four-Legged Municipality: The Street Dogs of Istanbul'. says this is no accident. 'We are a society that coexists with animals. Actually it's an eastern tradition. Every neighbourhood has its dogs and people who take care of them. So although our people loved dogs, they did not take them home but fed them on the street.

It has been a love-hate affair of late that, like many things in the polarised country, has taken on a political life of its own. Late last year, a four-year-old girl was attacked and seriously injured by a pair of pit bulls in Gaziantep, a large city in the south-east.

The pit bulls were pets rather than strays but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seized on the incident, declaring: 'Stray animals belong in shelters, not the streets.' The seemingly innocuous comment was in fact a jibe aimed at his rival, Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.

Two months before the girl was attacked, Mr Imamoglu had launched one of his many social media campaigns – this one featuring the travels of a stray called Boji on Istanbul's trains and ferries. Mr Erdogan's message was clear – the government was trying to make the streets safe from dogs let loose by the opposition.

The arguments grew more urgent with the emergence of an app called Havrita – made up of the words 'woof' and 'map' in Turkish – which allowed users to report the exact location of strays. Dogs began dying in droves after Havrita's launch in May.

'We began to hear more about poisoning cases or mass killings,' said lawyer Gulsaniye Ekmekci, pictured, of the Istanbul Bar's Animal Rights Commission. This month, an Ankara court sided with Havrita's critics, blocking access to its website and the app. 'We cannot solve the problem by killing animals,' Ms Ekmekci said.

Istanbul has tried eliminating its dogs before. In 1910, the Ottomans exiled 80,000 strays to a deserted island in the Sea of Marmara as part of a modernisation drive aimed at giving the empire's capital at the time a more European feel.

Director Serge Avedikian, whose film 'Barking Island' about the experiment won the Short Film Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2010, thinks dogs are victims of politics. 'A century later, dogs are again being used as scapegoats,' he said. "Since there's no dialogue in society and no agreement on hardly any issue, they settle scores through dogs."

Volkan Koc, pictured, founder of the Patilikoy shelter in the Turkish capital Ankara, takes a more optimistic view. 'Europeans have solved this problem by sterilising dogs and offering them up for adoption,' he said. 'We may be behind on this but our people have good hearts. We will never let a minority harm animals.'

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