Someone is leaving dogs in Kırşehir at night and nobody appears to know where they are coming from. Kırşehir Municipality says it is receiving increasing reports of dogs being left in residential areas, particularly during the night, and residents are now being asked to report them so municipal teams can collect them and take them to the Street Animals Rehabilitation Centre.
It would be easy to dismiss this as another example of people abandoning their dogs, except this is not the first time this year that dogs have apparently been transported and left somewhere in Kırşehir province. Earlier this year Mucur Municipality reported dogs being left collectively at different locations within the district. The municipality collected the animals and said administrative and legal proceedings would be initiated against whoever was responsible.
That was in February and seven months later we would quite like to know what happened to that investigation. Did Mucur establish who brought the dogs into the district? Were vehicles identified or CCTV recordings examined? Were any of the dogs microchipped or ear tagged and, if they were, what did those records tell the municipality about where the dogs had previously lived? Most importantly, what actually happened to the dogs themselves?
Reports at the time said the animals were collected and taken into the shelter system where they would receive health checks and care, but we have learned through years of monitoring stray dog populations that the word collected tells us very little about the eventual fate of an animal. Which shelter received these dogs, how many were there, were any subsequently adopted or transferred and are they still alive and accounted for today?
Kırşehir is particularly interesting because we already know that dogs legitimately move between municipalities within the province. Kırşehir Municipality’s own reporting shows arrangements with smaller municipalities that do not operate their own shelters and during 2025 Mucur sent 228 dogs and Boztepe another 117 through those arrangements. There is nothing suspicious about an authorised transfer. In fact it demonstrates why records are so important. If a dog is collected in one municipality and transferred to a facility in another, there should be a trail that allows us to follow that dog from one place to the next.
The dogs apparently being left in neighbourhoods are different because at the moment we have no idea who is moving them. Private owners are an obvious possibility and abandonment certainly did not disappear when Türkiye changed its approach to stray dogs. It is also conceivable that people caring for community dogs are moving them because they fear collection and believe the dogs will be safer somewhere else. Neither possibility should be discounted.
There is another source of abandoned dogs which we have probably not looked at closely enough and that is commercial breeding. There are documented cases in Türkiye of breeding operations closing with dogs left behind, illegal breeding facilities containing large numbers of animals and pedigree dogs originating in the commercial breeding system subsequently entering shelters or being abandoned. Puppies which cannot be sold still have to be fed and cared for, as do breeding dogs which no longer have a commercial value. We are going to look at that separately because breeder dumping deserves an investigation of its own, but for now it has to remain among the possible explanations for groups of dogs suddenly appearing somewhere they did not previously live.
There is also another possibility and, given what is currently happening across Türkiye, it would be foolish not to consider it. Could dogs be being moved from one municipality into another?
We have no evidence that another municipality is responsible for the dogs appearing in Kırşehir and we are not alleging that one is, but municipalities across Türkiye are currently under enormous pressure to clear dogs from their streets. That instruction is considerably easier to issue than it is to carry out because collecting a dog does not make the dog cease to exist. It simply transfers responsibility for that animal from the street to somewhere else and that somewhere requires space, food, veterinary care, staff and money, potentially for the remainder of the dog’s life.
Some municipalities are much better equipped to do that than others and it is important not to fall into the misconception that every mayor in Türkiye enthusiastically supports the current policy or wants dogs dead. They do not. Municipalities are not one homogeneous group and neither are the people running them. Some have spent years supporting sterilisation and community-dog programmes. Some have resisted aspects of national policy. Some will be desperately trying to comply with instructions from central government while also trying to keep the animals for which they are responsible alive. Others have made decisions and overseen facilities which deserve very serious scrutiny.
That distinction becomes extremely important if we eventually discover that dogs are being moved between municipalities outside the official transfer system because we would still need to understand why. Moving dogs could conceivably be a way of making one municipality’s problem somebody else’s, particularly when authorities are being judged on their ability to clear dogs from their streets. It is equally possible that somebody might believe moving dogs elsewhere is protecting them from confinement or an outcome they fear. Neither explanation makes dumping dogs acceptable. Removing established community dogs and abandoning them in unfamiliar territory carries serious welfare consequences of its own, but motive matters if we are going to understand what is actually happening rather than deciding everybody involved has the same intention.
Then we come back to Kırşehir itself because every dog arriving there has to go somewhere. The city’s rehabilitation centre was reported in 2022 to have been built for approximately 140 animals while already caring for somewhere between 250 and 300. Those figures are four years old and we cannot pretend they tell us how many dogs are inside today, but they make finding today’s figures considerably more important.
We need to know the centre’s current capacity and occupancy, how many dogs have entered during 2026, how many were collected within Kırşehir and how many arrived through legitimate transfers from surrounding municipalities. We also need the other side of those figures. How many dogs were adopted, returned to owners or transferred elsewhere, how many died, how many were euthanised and how many remain in municipal care? Somewhere within those figures we should also now be able to identify dogs collected after residents reported that they had apparently been dumped.
Those dogs themselves may contain some of the answers. A microchip may identify an owner. An ear tag may connect a community dog to a previous municipal programme. Several established community dogs arriving together might suggest that a population has been moved from somewhere else, while a group of similar-age pedigree puppies would take us in a very different direction. If dogs are being deposited in residential areas during the night there may also be CCTV, traffic cameras or private security cameras capable of showing how they got there.
All of this becomes considerably more important when placed alongside Türkiye’s national collection figures. Authorities have reported that 98.69% of the country’s stray dogs have been collected, but that is still a collection figure and collection figures cannot tell us whether a dog is alive, dead, adopted, confined, transferred or somewhere completely different.
If a dog disappears from the streets of one municipality and enters a shelter, there should be an admission record. If that dog is legitimately transferred to another municipality, there should be records at both ends. If it is adopted, dies or is euthanised, there should be an outcome record. That is how a system which is removing animals on this scale should allow the public to follow what happens to them.
But if a dog is put into a vehicle, driven across an administrative boundary and left on another municipality’s streets, the numbers tell a very different story. Municipality A has one fewer dog. Municipality B has one more. The national dog population has not fallen and the dog has not received an outcome at all. It has simply been moved.
We do not know whether that is what is happening in Kırşehir. The people leaving these dogs may turn out to be private owners, breeders, people attempting to protect community dogs, another municipality or somebody we have not yet considered. That is precisely why the investigation announced by Mucur in February matters and why the identification and outcome records of the dogs now being collected in Kırşehir matter.
Someone is dumping dogs in Kırşehir. We are not going to decide who it is without evidence. But we do want to know where those dogs are coming from.