Türkiye is carrying out an enormous change in the way it manages its street dogs. Dogs are being removed from streets and taken into shelters and natural living areas, new facilities are being built and existing ones expanded. With that comes a question that should be remarkably easy to answer: how many dogs enter the system, and what happens to them afterwards?
We have spent a considerable amount of time looking at the figures published by municipalities and other public authorities, and there is much more information available than might first appear. Collection numbers are published, shelter capacities are announced and we can find figures for sterilisation, treatment, adoption and, in some places, transfers to other organisations or facilities. What is much harder to find is a complete journey through the system.
Ankara is a good example. In May 2025, Ankara Governor Vasip Şahin said the province’s 17 animal care facilities had capacity for 13,045 animals and were already more than 80% occupied. He also reported that 7,452 dogs had been collected during March, April and up to 26 May. That gives us a significant collection figure and an indication of how full the system was at that point, but Ankara’s capacity has continued to develop. Karataş alone can accommodate 6,000 animals, Mühye in Çankaya has expanded, Mamak has its own substantial facility and Ankara Metropolitan Municipality is developing a further natural living area at Gökçeyurt.
There are outcome figures too. Thousands of animals have been adopted and thousands of dogs have been transferred to civil-society organisations, associations and living areas. Yet those figures cover different periods and different populations, so they cannot simply be put into a calculator to tell us how many dogs should currently be inside Ankara’s facilities. That is the first thing this work has shown us: there is a difference between having lots of numbers and having transparent outcome data.
Ankara The Published Data
İzmir makes the problem even clearer. While checking İzmir’s figures, we found that official shelter-capacity numbers changed depending on when they were published. In March 2025, official information described capacity for 3,150 dogs across PAKO, Seyrek and Işıkkent. A year later, a municipal statement referred to capacity of 3,500 across the three Metropolitan Municipality shelters, while in July 2026 another official statement put their combined capacity at 3,300.
Then, in October, the municipality published the individual capacities: 1,150 at PAKO, 550 at Işıkkent and 1,180 at Seyrek, giving a total of 2,880. Add the 600 places at the Kiraz facility operated through municipal cooperation and the four-facility total becomes 3,480. That does not automatically mean there is anything improper about the figures. Facilities change, areas can open and close and the way capacity is calculated can change, but it does demonstrate why dates and definitions are so important. If we simply wrote that İzmir has capacity for a certain number of dogs without recording when that figure was published and which facilities it included, we could create a misleading picture ourselves.
Another figure from İzmir demonstrates the problem particularly well. In March 2026, approximately 2,300 animals were reported across the three Metropolitan shelters and the Kiraz cooperative facility, while the same announcement referred to capacity of 3,500 across the three Metropolitan shelters. At first glance those numbers invite a simple occupancy calculation, but the 2,300 figure includes Kiraz and the 3,500 figure does not. They do not describe precisely the same system, so using one against the other to calculate occupancy would produce a figure the published data does not actually support. That may sound like a small technical distinction, but when thousands of dogs are being removed from communities, it isn’t.
İzmir - The Published Data
This is why we have started building our own record of the published data. The information needed to understand what is happening should not be complicated: we need to know how many dogs enter municipal care, how many are being held and what happens to them afterwards. Yet even across Ankara and İzmir, bringing those three parts of the picture together is remarkably difficult.
Adoption figures are published, as are sterilisation and treatment figures. Transfers are sometimes reported, shelter capacities are announced and new facilities are being built. But these figures frequently cover different periods, different facilities and sometimes different species. What is missing is a consistent trail from collection to outcome. That doesn’t prove something has happened to the dogs; it means the published data does not yet allow us to establish what has happened to all of them, and that distinction is important.
Ankara and İzmir are the beginning of this work, not the conclusion. We will continue across Türkiye, recording the figures authorities publish and tracking how collection, capacity, occupancy and outcomes change over time. As more dogs are removed from the streets, the question of what happens after collection becomes increasingly important. A collection figure tells us that a dog has entered the system, but it should also be possible to follow what happens next.
As Türkiye’s street-dog population moves increasingly out of public spaces and behind the gates of municipal facilities, public visibility of those dogs is disappearing too. The dogs may be disappearing from the streets, but the data about what happens to them should not disappear with them.