Turkey’s plan to remove stray dogs is inhumane. There’s a better way.

For many in the United States, the idea of a dog without an owner and on the streets invokes a sense of sadness and neglect.
But that’s not the case everywhere. In some countries, stray dogs are an everyday part of life. They roam streets and towns and live alongside their human neighbors, who leave out food and water for their furry friends. But even in places where stray dogs are common, a tension can still exist between these ownerless dogs and humans. Dog bites can lead to illnesses, like rabies, and can cause severe injury or death. Life on the streets isn’t necessarily ideal for these animals either: stray dogs can be at risk for hunger, untreated injuries, and abuse from humans.
In Turkey, where an estimated 4 million stray dogs live, this conflict has risen all the way to the highest level of government. Last month, lawmakers passed legislation that would require municipalities to round up the millions of stray dogs and place them in shelters, as well as a mandate to euthanize animals that are sick or pose a risk to humans. The policy caused a lot of outrage from animal welfare advocates and the main opposition political party, who say the law will allow for these dogs to be killed indiscriminately and call it a “massacre law.”
“I think it’s really a step back in progressive ways of thinking about healthy cities, progressive cities, managing dogs in a humane way,” said Katherine Polak, the vice president of companion animals and engagement at Humane Society International (HSI), about the new law. “And that’s what people want, both internationally and within Turkey.”
Managing the stray dog population and the problems that arise from it shouldn’t require a death sentence for these animals, researchers and activists argue. Ultimately, stray dogs are the products of humans. Their sustained growth stems from human practices, like people abandoning their dogs, neglecting to spay or neuter them, feeding strays, and improper waste management.
Multiple truths can exist at once: stray dogs can cause harm to humans, human decisions are largely the reason for stray dogs’ existence and their sizable growth, and stray dogs are prone to being villainized for simply being dogs without a human owner. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to reconcile these realities and create workable solutions. Countries like India and Bhutan can serve as models for what works, what doesn’t, and what challenges still exist for creating a better, safer dynamic between dogs and humans.
In 2004, Turkey passed their Animal Protection Law, which gave all animals — domesticated or ownerless — the right to protection and a comfortable life. It was a win for animal lovers everywhere, and solidified Turkey’s deep history of living side by side with street dogs and cats, both of which have been the stars of documentaries that examine their free-roaming life and the relationship they share with humans. The law also included provisions on neutering and vaccinating stray animals before returning them to where they were found, effectively allowing stray dogs and cats to live their lives freely without uncontrolled reproduction.
However, implementing the sterilization and vaccination regulations has been spotty, say Turkish animal welfare organizations like Haytap. Animal rights groups say that it’s this inconsistent fulfillment from local governments that has led to a growth in the number of stray dogs.
Now, the law has taken a turn against the dogs. After President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke on attacks and accidents caused by free-roaming dogs late last year, lawmakers drafted legislation to amend the Animal Protection Law and get strays off the streets. An initial proposal called for any stray animal to be euthanized if they weren’t adopted after 30 days of being in a shelter. After pushback, the final amended version passed at the end of July. It mandated that stray animals be put into shelters, sterilized and vaccinated, and kept there until they’re adopted — though euthanasia is still required for sick or aggressive dogs.
But the country doesn’t have enough animal shelters to house millions of strays. Estimates say there’s room for around 100,000 animals across a little over 300 shelters. And according to animal welfare advocates, these shelters don’t currently have enough resources to provide a safe and healthy space for strays, let alone the space for the millions of dogs on the streets.
“These are government pounds that have very, very limited resources,” Polak told Vox. “Shelters are incredibly expensive to run if you want to provide good quality welfare.”
To address this concern, the new law also mandates that municipalities use a small portion of their budgets to build and improve animal shelters by 2028. However, critics are still worried that it will just be easier to cull these dogs rather than invest the money and time in the shelters — and reports have already come out about pits of dead dogs near animal pounds.
The amended Animal Protection Law might be more than just about stray dogs; some say it could be about politics and power, too. It’s a potential measure to continue wrangling power from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition political party, after the Justice and Development Party — President Erdogan’s party — faced major losses in March. The law also includes fines and prison time for mayors who don’t enforce the impounding of stray dogs, which the CHP has repeatedly stated it wouldn’t do.
Last week, the CHP applied to annul the law to the country’s Constitutional Court, which will decide if the law stays or is thrown out. Regardless, the fierce debate on what to do about stray dogs is ongoing.
Turkey isn’t the only country with a sizable stray dog population. In India, some estimates show as many as 70 million dogs roaming freely. The country also has 36 percent of the world’s rabies deaths in humans, making the issue of stray dogs particularly salient and contentious. When an attack or rabies case happens, the knee-jerk reaction from some is to euthanize the stray dogs, citing them as a danger to society. Indeed, both Turkey and India have a history of mass culling dogs in cruel ways, prior to the passage of more humane animal welfare legislation like Turkey’s original Animal Protection Law and India’s Animal Birth Control Rules.
But major international groups like the World Health Organization and the World Organisation for Animal Health say mass culling doesn’t work as a main strategy for stray dog management or for meaningfully decreasing rabies. Studies have shown that culling en masse is largely ineffective because dogs continue to be abandoned, while simultaneously reproducing quickly because they lack permanent sterilization — allowing other dogs to fill the space where previous dogs may have lived. It also doesn’t help reduce rabies because the new dogs and litters that inhabit a space aren’t vaccinated against diseases.
In an effort to humanely control the stray dog population, animal welfare advocates, veterinarians, and researchers in India have been working for decades to understand what works. The main approach has been to sterilize, vaccinate, and release stray dogs back where they were found — a strategy that is widely considered humane and effective. But doing these procedures consistently and at a sufficient pace has been a struggle, which can impact the effectiveness of this approach.
“We are not probably sterilizing as quickly as the dogs are reproducing,” Alokparna Sengupta, the managing director of the Humane Society International in India, told Vox. “So that’s one of the issues, and that’s why we have to do a high throughput system of spay and neuter.”
Managing the stray dog population doesn’t necessarily mean attempting to reduce the amount of dogs on the street all the way down to zero, but rather to stabilize the population. HSI India aims to sterilize and vaccinate 80 percent of stray dogs in order to do this. They’ve had success in reaching those milestones, or getting close, across various towns and cities in India.
But hitting that 80 percent goal is just the first step. Maintaining it is another issue, and it’s one that can easily come undone. One town in India called Nainital had reached a 97 percent sterilization and vaccination rate in 2020. Three years later, that number dropped down to 76 percent, Sengupta told Vox.
“Many pet owners were letting loose their dogs, who were then meeting with dogs who were outside,” she said. The result was an increase of puppies on the street, and a drop in the total sterilization and vaccination rates. Focusing on stray dogs alone only went so far.
The root cause of a stray dog population varies from country to country, but there are some common factors that most countries share. People abandoning their dogs and forgoing sterilizing their dogs, whether due to irresponsible pet ownership or financial constraints, is one of the main reasons for the existence of stray dogs in the first place. But for a stray dog population to rapidly grow also requires access to food and water. People living in communities with strays will often provide these necessities as a way of caring for these dogs. There are also unintentional ways that humans can support the growth of stray dogs, primarily improper food waste management.
Stabilizing the population alone won’t completely solve conflict between humans and dogs. A successful stray dog population management program will also target humans and how we perceive interactions with our four-legged neighbors. Addressing issues around dogs defecating in public will inherently require a different solution from bites or barking, for instance, says Krithika Srinivasan, a professor of political ecology at the University of Edinburgh.
“It’s about managing dogs, but managing dogs in different ways for different problems,” says Srinivasan. “But it’s also about working with people — not just about bite prevention and what you do if you get bitten, but also about how you deal with everyday problems like chasing, how do you care for dogs, how do you interact with dogs in a way that doesn’t create more problems?”
Sengupta says that HSI India has made community engagement a part of its strategy for a more long-term, sustainable stray dog population control. Its team educates people across India on the importance of spay and neutering, how street dogs can ward off pests, and the problems that can sometimes arise from feeding strays.
Government offices, municipalities, pet owners, and community members need to be folded in and taken into consideration when crafting programs to stabilize and manage stray dog populations. It’s not an easy task — but one country has shown that it’s possible.
Back in 2009, the Royal Government of Bhutan began a partnership with HSI to implement a nationwide spay-neuter-vaccination program. Last year, after over a decade of work together, Bhutan became the first country in the world to announce it had sterilized and vaccinated 100 percent of its stray dog population.
Polak says it came down to a long-term commitment of government willingness, community engagement, and building up relevant infrastructure like training veterinarians and data collection. “It is not a one-off spay-neuter campaign,” she said. “It’s not a one-week, one-month, one-year intervention.”
The willingness of the surrounding governing bodies, institutions, and communities is critical to effectively managing stray dog populations and the interactions that come with them. While much can be gleaned from Bhutan’s stray dog management program, there were barriers to its success and there will be obstacles to replicating the efforts in other countries. For starters, Bhutan is much smaller than countries like Turkey or India. Keren Nazareth, the senior director of companion animals and engagement at HSI India, told Vox in an email that factors like increasing veterinary capacity and getting communities involved in Bhutan were challenging. In the case of Turkey, the New York Times reported that the president of the Turkish Veterinary Medical Association said they needed at least 10,000 more vets in municipalities.
It’s clear that humanely managing the population of stray dogs requires a lot of work from a lot of different people and institutions. In Bhutan, it took 14 years to get to 100 percent sterilization and vaccination. One can imagine it would take a lot longer to get close to those rates for bigger countries.
It will come down to countries and their people to decide: Will they take shorter routes that will assuredly result in disappointment, cruelty, and death, or will they choose a long-term investment in all of those who reside in their cities and towns — human and animals, domesticated and free?