Perched on a hill, the site dominates the hilly, agricultural landscape of the town of Nigde, a grey Anatolian town, devoid of charm and nuance, flanked by huge houses crushed by the sun of this deep Turkish south. A simple sign from the town hall, placed at the edge of the track, says “animal cemetery”. There is nothing but a few mounds of earth and holes in the shape of trenches. At the foot of one of them, a dog with a broken neck lies under a shovel of white lime. The blood is still bright red. All around it, the silhouettes of other bodies swept away by the rubble can be distinguished.
Here, two animal rights activists, Emine and Melis (names changed), filmed on 6 August the town hall agents who came to drop off half a dozen dogs. Lifeless bodies in plastic bags abandoned early in the morning. The images posted on social media immediately caused a stir. They join the photographs of mass graves of dogs that appear 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.
These images 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 according to the authorities number four million across the country. This text, approved by the Islamo-nationalist coalition in power of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, obliges municipalities to collect stray dogs and house them in shelters where they will be vaccinated and sterilized before offering them for adoption. Above all, it imposes the euthanasia of dogs considered “sick” EITHER “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 are not enough places in the shelters, a route has been opened for the sacrificesaid veterinarian Turkan Ceylan on the day the law was passed. We animal rights activists know very well that this means death. Turkey has a total of 322 shelters, with a capacity of just 105,000 dogs. In cities, especially in the peripheral districts of large urban centres and medium-sized towns, stray dogs, as they are called, are part of everyday life and even the imagination. Since the first tourist guides appeared in the 19th century,my In the 19th century, dogs were mentioned under the heading of “nuisance” or “curiosities”.
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