To live like a dog in Istanbul
The people of Istanbul love cats and dogs.
This photo I shot in the metro. It is a great place to be for a dog when it is 30 degrees centigrade outside. At first I was uncertain: were these dogs maybe dead or sick? But no, they were resting.
You see many more dogs like these two, all over Istanbul, laying on the ground, having a continuous siesta. They are a lazy bunch indeed.
Most of them have a green tag in their ear and are the same labradorish breed. They don’t seem to have an owner, but are clearly well-fed. Actually, most of them are overweight. The fattest dog I have ever seen lives in Istanbul on the street.
You see dog houses here and there, and little bowls of water and animal food everywhere, in front of apartment buildings, or on the stairs to monuments. Usually a dog owner limits how much his dog eats, but Istanbul is an all-you-can-eat buffet for dogs.
A lady who was walking her dog in my neighbourhood, which is a kind of westernized bohemian place with no dogs laying about, told me that a few years ago the city government wanted to kill all street dogs. The animal lovers of Istanbul organised a protest and the city backed down. Now the dogs are under control of the city government (maybe they are sterilized or neutered?)
There are plenty of street cats, too. Like the dogs, they are well fed, although not overweight like their canine compatriots. The bowls of food are meant for them as well. The cats are clearly domesticated, they have no fear of humans. They are easy to approach and many of them love to be stroked. Everywhere you see little cathouses like the ones in the background of this picture.
A Turkish friend of mine told me that, when she lived abroad, it made her sad that there were no cats and dogs in the streets. Once, in Sidney, she and her boyfriend took a cab. Suddenly he shouted: “Stop, stop!” and jumped out of the car to stroke and hug a cat he had seen sitting in the street. She joined him, while they kept the taxi waiting, The driver said:” You guys are crazy.”
This love of animals goes back a long time. In the book “Istanbul” by Orhan Pamuk I read a story about a street vendor who tied his horse to a tree and went to drink and play cards in a coffee house. This being the 19th century, a bey (the title of some Ottoman dignitary) passed by and saw the scene. He was enraged by the maltreatment of the animal and tied the street vendor to the tree instead of the horse.
There is a story about the street dogs of Istanbul. In 1911 there was a city wide dog razzia, and they were all ferried off to one of the islands in the Bosporus to die of hunger. Then there was a earthquake, and this was seen as a divine sign of disapproval, and they were all released in the streets again. I take this story as an indication of the love for animals, because why were the dogs not exterminated in the first place? Maybe because no one wanted to kill them with their own hands.
I used to have the theory that a culture that values the wellbeing of animals also values the well-being of humans.
Not necesarily so, it turns out. The Ottoman authorities used many different cruel and elaborated ways of executing miscreants. Even at the end of the 19th century criminals were put on a stake. Not a fun way to die. There goes another theory out of the window.
Anyway, we don’t have to conduct a survey to safely conclude the street dogs and cats in Istanbul must be pretty happy with their lives.