Türkiye has put a system in place intended to make abandoning a dog considerably harder to get away with. Dogs are supposed to be microchipped and registered, ownership can be traced through the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s PETVET system and abandoning an animal is prohibited. Yet in Antalya, abandonment is increasing.
On 11 September, Antalya Chamber of Veterinarians President Tevfik Murat Karabayoğlu described a growing number of animals being abandoned in the city, including pedigree dogs which people had previously paid substantial amounts of money to own. Animals bought to live in homes are now appearing on the streets.
This is exactly the kind of abandonment Türkiye’s identification system should make difficult.
A dog that has spent its life as part of a family should not simply be able to become an anonymous stray. It should be scanned, its microchip should connect it to a registration and that registration should lead back to the person responsible for it. But that only works if the dog is actually in the system.
Karabayoğlu points to animals remaining unregistered as a significant problem. Without registration, authorities can find themselves looking at a dog which has quite obviously belonged to somebody while having no straightforward way of establishing who that somebody was.
That is a very large hole in a system built around traceability. And we need some numbers.
How many apparently abandoned dogs have been collected in Antalya during 2026? How many were scanned? How many had functioning microchips? How many chips identified registered owners? How many owners were contacted? How many abandonment investigations followed and how many resulted in penalties?
Then there are the dogs with no traceable owner. How many were unchipped? How many had chips which were not properly registered? How many were registered to somebody other than the person who most recently had the dog? How many were pedigree animals which had clearly passed through the commercial pet market but nevertheless arrived on an Antalya street without a usable trail leading back through their ownership?
Those aren’t minor administrative details. They tell us whether the system designed to make dogs traceable actually does so when somebody decides they no longer want one.
The pedigree dogs are particularly difficult to ignore. These animals did not simply materialise on Antalya’s streets. Somebody bred them. Somebody sold or transferred them. Somebody acquired them. Somewhere along that chain there should be a record connecting a commercially produced dog with the person ultimately responsible for it. If there isn’t, we need to know why.
We are going to look separately at commercial breeding because there are questions there which deserve considerably more attention. Türkiye has documented cases involving illegal breeding establishments, pedigree dogs being recovered from breeding operations and dogs being left behind when breeding facilities closed. None of that establishes where the particular dogs now being abandoned in Antalya originated, but it does make one question unavoidable.
What happens to commercially bred dogs when nobody wants them?
What happens to puppies which don’t sell? What happens when a fashionable breed stops being fashionable? What happens to breeding dogs when they are no longer commercially useful? What records account for those animals and who checks them?
We will come back to that. For now, Antalya has a more immediate problem because the dogs being abandoned today have to go somewhere.
Karabayoğlu highlights that vulnerability and also the difficulty of finding homes for adult dogs. Once collected, an abandoned owned dog becomes another animal requiring municipal space, food, veterinary treatment and potentially long-term care.
That is happening while municipalities are simultaneously being required to collect existing free-roaming dogs. Every owned dog abandoned into that system adds another animal to a population Türkiye is already devoting enormous resources to removing from public spaces.
If Antalya is seeing increasing numbers of the latter, we need to know how many and we need to know how often the person responsible is actually identified.
Microchipping and registration should give us that information. Enforcement records should tell us what happens afterwards. Shelter admission records should tell us how many formerly owned dogs are now being absorbed into municipal care.
Without those numbers, we are left with a policy intended to make abandonment traceable alongside a veterinary profession telling us that abandonment is increasing.
So where is the system breaking?