
On top of a hill, the place dominates the rolling, agricultural countryside of the city of Nigde, a gray city of Anatolia, without charm or nuance, flanked by massive houses crushed by the sun of this deep Turkish South. A simple sign from the town hall, planted at the edge of the track, indicates “cemetery for animals”. There is nothing, except a few mounds of earth and holes in the shape of trenches. At the bottom of one of them, a dog with a broken neck lies under a shovelful of white lime. The blood is still bright red. All around, we can make out the outlines of other bodies leveled by the rubble.
It was here that two animal rights activists, Emine and Melis (names have been changed), filmed, on August 6, city hall agents who had come to drop off half a dozen dogs. Inert bodies in plastic bags abandoned in the early morning. The images published on social networks immediately caused a stir. They were added to the photos of mass graves of dogs that were then emerging from all over the country: Altindag, a district of Ankara, Edirne, in Thrace, Tokat, in the Black Sea region, Sanliurfa, in the South, or Uzunköprü, a small town near Bulgaria.
Above all, these images have confirmed the fears of animal rights activists, who had opposed the adoption on July 30 of a controversial law aimed at regulating the population of stray dogs, which the authorities say number 4 million across the country. This text, supported by the ruling Islamo-nationalist coalition of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, requires municipalities to collect stray dogs and house them in shelters where they will be vaccinated and sterilized before being offered for adoption. Above all, it imposes the euthanasia of dogs considered to be “sick” Or “aggressive”, according to procedures not yet defined.
“A danger for our children”
Opponents of the law see it as a form of “license to kill”as the author and poet Ahmet Ümit wrote. “As there is not enough space in the shelters, a way has been opened for the slaughtersaid veterinarian Turkan Ceylan on the day the law was passed. We animal rights activists know very well that this means death.” On a national scale, Turkey has a total of 322 shelters, with a capacity of just 105,000 dogs. In cities, especially in the outskirts of large urban centers and medium-sized towns, street dogs, as they are called, are part of everyday life and even of the imagination. Since the first tourist guides appeared in the 19th century,e century, dogs are mentioned either under the heading of “nuisance” or under that of “curiosities”.
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