Saving Dogs In Turkey - The Beginning

“No puppy should be born to stray. It is our moral duty to protect them from suffering. No matter where in the world they were born” Michelle Robertson Dog Desk Animal Action CIC

I’m just a girl who likes dogs, I’m nobody special, I’ve never done anything extraordinary or admirable. I don’t seek the limelight & I shy away from praise. But I care, I care an awful lot. I care about people & animals. I don’t like inequality & I don’t like suffering & I am the kind of person who never looks away or walks on by when I see suffering.

My journey to the place I find myself in today began when I was 5 years old. Living in Canada at a time when seal hunters were clubbing newborns to death I was absolutely horrified that men could be that cruel. It was unfathomable to me that anyone could hurt such a small, defenceless creature. From that moment on my future was set.

I spent decades volunteering for various organisations doing all kinds of things to help our natural world, from tree planting to surveying flora & fauna populations in areas of interest to sabbing in the eighties & much more.

In more recent years my attention was drawn to the suffering of dogs after we realised that our family dog Mutley was born on a notorious puppy farm in Victoria Australia. He was extremely unwell with an inherited condition & while we were able to help him my mind was deeply troubled by thoughts of what his parents were going through at the mill.

When we returned to the UK I couldn’t help but notice a shift in how many of us brits acquire our dogs. Before I left the UK for Australia folks were mostly buying puppies or acquiring mixed breeds that had been happy accidents. But now, there were a great many dogs arriving from overseas. From countries such as Romania where stray dogs lead terrible lives, often ending up in kill shelters where euthanasia is anything but kind & used as a population control tool. That is not acceptable!

So, I began to spay & neuter. It seemed ridiculous to me that dogs were being bussed across countries to safe homes (which they absolutely totally needed) without a focus on sterilisation programmes to stop the problem in the first place. And I vaccinated in countries where rabies was endemic. One of the reasons dogs suffer when they are cruelly culled is due to fear of rabies. It made sense to me to mitigate that risk & reduce fear by preventing the dogs from contracting the disease therefore reducing fear in their communities.

While I was busy vaccinating & sterilising I built a small community & it was this community who reached out to me during the war on dogs in Turkey. The president made a speech following the mauling of a young girl by two owned dogs. This speech was misunderstood & led to a great many dogs being rounded up & sent to remote locations where access to food & water was denied. They soon perished. Other stray dogs were poisoned, shot & bludgeoned.

I couldn’t ignore the situation they were in or the cries for help from so many animal lovers.

With no budget, no contacts, an inability to speak the language & from so far away. I was determined to do something. I had to find a way.

I began by galvanising the community & sending dog food to community carers who had taken in dogs to keep them safe.

Then, as luck would have it I found a municipal shelter which was empty due to lack of funding. To cut a long story short, a Turkish animal advocate & I persuaded the Mayor to let us have the keys & a historic landmark event took place. We now had a safe space for hundreds of dogs!

You can read about the shelter & the clinic within it which we provided here

Since opening the shelter project hundreds of dogs have been saved. Hundreds of stray dogs have been sterilised saving thousands of puppies from future suffering & a great many dogs suffering from illness or injury have been healed. And we are not too far off serving our first million meals to starving strays.

Our mission in Turkey has expanded exponentially despite being one of the smallest & poorest organisations.

We are currently funding the provision of a building in the east of the country. In an area affected by the earthquakes which left a great many dogs & cats orphaned & forced to live on the streets. Many of them unsterilised, forced the stray population up sharply.

Our free homeless animal clinic has opened up to accept patients nationwide.

And we are poised to take on our biggest challenge to date. Please subscribe so that you are among the first people we reveal this much needed project to.

We are in desperate need of more supporters, please can you share this publication with your friends & if you would like to donate to our lifesaving work you can do so here in your own currency