At his shelter on the outskirts of Istanbul, Murat Cem Yetkin refers to his dozens of stray dogs as “the kids.”
There is Handsome, the pudgy hound, and a massive Kangal Shepherd named Sarin. Cared for and relatively free, they roam Yetkin’s rambling property — and are now among the luckier canines in Turkey.
This summer, the parliament passed a law to regulate the country’s
roughly 4 million stray dogs. It requires municipalities to round up strays and put them in an overcrowded shelter network, and to euthanize dogs that are feral.
Animal rights activists, fearing a mass culling, have dubbed it the “massacre law.”...
