In Turkey there is no longer simply a disagreement about stray dogs, shelters, public safety, or municipal policy. The atmosphere is changing psychologically. In recent days, two separate incidents revealed just how far parts of the discussion around animals have escalated.
In one case a social media figure claimed that people defending animals were motivated by zoophilia. In another, TRT presenter Işıl Açıkkar became the target of public outrage after saying during an Anneler Günü broadcast that she was a pet mother. Reports later claimed she was removed from the main news bulletin following a backlash.
The language surrounding animals in Turkey is becoming increasingly ideological, moralised, and psychologically aggressive. First, street dogs were framed as a public danger. Then people defending them began facing accusations of irrationality, emotional instability, or social irresponsibility. Now compassion itself is increasingly being reframed as moral deviance.
This shift is something we should all be very worried about. Because once ordinary empathy becomes treated with suspicion, societies begin entering dangerous territory psychologically.
The accusation of zoophilia is particularly revealing because it attempts to transform compassion into pathology. Feeding dogs, rescuing injured animals, opposing cruelty, or objecting to mass killing campaigns are not unusual human behaviours. Across the world, millions of people engage in animal welfare activity because they are responding to visible suffering.
To reinterpret that as sexual abnormality is not a policy argument. It is an attempt to socially contaminate the people involved.
Historically, this kind of rhetoric follows familiar patterns. First a target group is blamed for a societal problem. Then supporters of that group become publicly stigmatised. Eventually empathy itself becomes portrayed as suspicious, weak, traitorous, or morally corrupted.
At the same time, the reaction to the phrase patili anne, which translates to pawed mum or pet mother demonstrates how emotionally ordinary language around animals is now being pulled into wider culture-war politics.
Only a few years ago, calling yourself a dog mum, cat dad, or pet parent in Turkey would have been viewed as harmless everyday language used casually by millions of people. Most understand it as affectionate shorthand, not a literal replacement for parenthood.
But in increasingly polarised environments, even ordinary expressions of care can become ideological battlegrounds. This is why these incidents should not be viewed in isolation from the wider stray dog crisis unfolding in Turkey.
The country is already experiencing mass round-ups, mounting public tension,
extreme online rhetoric, growing reports of violence toward animals and increasing hostility toward animal advocates themselves.
Against that backdrop, the public language used around animals begins to matter far more than many people realise. Because language shapes psychological permission. When dogs are repeatedly described as threats, infestations, or enemies, violence toward them becomes easier for some people to justify.
When the people defending them are portrayed as mentally abnormal, sexually deviant, or morally corrupted, hostility toward those people also becomes easier to justify socially. This is how public discourse deteriorates. One rhetorical step at a time.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect is that the debate increasingly appears to be moving away from practical discussion altogether. Questions about shelter capacity, sterilisation programmes, vaccination coverage, infrastructure, adoption systems, and animal management are becoming overshadowed by culture-war dynamics built around outrage, identity, humiliation, and ideological signalling. And once empathy itself becomes politically suspicious, societies begin entering psychologically unhealthy territory very quickly.
History shows that extermination campaigns do not begin with extermination alone. They begin with psychological conditioning. First the target is presented as a threat that must disappear. Then the people opposing the removal or killing are publicly discredited, mocked, or portrayed as morally deviant. Over time, this changes what feels socially acceptable.
The mass killing of dogs stops feeling shocking to parts of the public because the emotional and moral status of both the dogs and their defenders has already been degraded beforehand. That is what makes the zoophilia accusations and the backlash against the phrase patili anne so important.
They are not random controversies. They are part of a wider social process that helps make the extermination of dogs feel more morally acceptable, more socially defensible, and less emotionally disturbing to increasing numbers of people.