Uncertain future for 2,000 dogs in Beykoz
Turkish Daily News, Thursday, April 10, 2008
The Beykoz Dog Shelter becomes the scene of a tense dispute between the city and volunteers. Members of the press and volunteers gathered at the shelter Tuesday, under the watchful eye of the city's municipal patrol forces, to get access to the 2,000 dogs
DAMARIS KREMIDA
ISTANBUL – Turkish Daily News
Beykoz municipal patrol (Zab?ta) forces locked down a local dog shelter Tuesday, forbidding the volunteers who had cared for the 2,000 dogs at the shelter over the last three years from entering the premises.
Last week all 10 staff members at the Beykoz Municipal Animal Shelter were let go and replaced by two new staff members selected by the municipality. This week, shelter managers, Berrin Olcay and Yasemin Baban, and the volunteers were denied access when they tried to enter the compound to feed the animals.
Confusion and speculation as to the decision and plans of the municipality flared yesterday as volunteers of the shelter tried to make sense of their "excommunication".
Many believe the municipality is planning to hand management of the shelter over to a private pharmaceutical firm, or close the shelter, and/or kill the dogs, although a Beykoz Municipality spokesman refuted all these theories yesterday.
"Those are lies in every way," Deputy Beykoz Mayor Ihsan Öksüz told the Turkish Daily News. "We are not closing. We just changed the personnel. We are continuing to take care of the dogs and are not going to kill them." The Beykoz Municipality's spokesperson said they were not planning on handing management of the shelter to a private firm, but are going to take care of the dogs with their own staff. The deputy, however, was quick to fire back an accusation about the previous management. "They were making money off the dogs. They were selling them in Europe to test laboratories," he said. Öksüz said the municipality had gotten word that 400 of the dogs had been sold in Europe. "They were dangerous to the dogs," said Öksüz. The deputy mayor claimed that other animal protection associations had accused the team of volunteers of corruption.
Baban told the TDN that it was true that some of the dogs, most of which were blind or had a disability, were sent for adoption to loving homes in Europe so that they would have higher chance of survival than living with the rest of the pack in the shelter. The cost of such re-homing is about 300 euros she said, for medical reports, vaccinations and transportation to Europe, barely a profitable sum. But all of that was beside the point, she said.
"Our main concern now is that there are 2,000 dogs and a few cats there and they have not eaten in two days," said Baban. "They are all in cages and the new staff there don't know about dogs." She and the other volunteers collected about 2.5 tons of food every day from various firms in the area. Now as the dogs are getting hungry the little food the municipality is able to scrape together could become a source of fighting and put them in further danger, she explained. "All the dogs will fight and kill each other."
Baban and other volunteers fear the shelter will become a burial ground in the hands of the municipality. "The dogs are going to die," she said. "They want to close the shelter because the land is important. They haven't been able to manage neutering and re-homing. As we are going to elections they want the dogs to disappear. They will kill them." Baban and other volunteers explained there is no money to be made off the dogs, as costs of maintaining the shelter and staffing experienced veterinarians are high. Also, she said the municipality pitted different animal rights groups against each other to cover up their own purposes. Volunteers and other sources believe that contested pharmaceuticals group Anadolu Ilaç, a firm that lost a contract to manage a Sariyer Municipality shelter after reports of poisoning and burning of dogs were released, may take over management of the shelter.
"They are giving the shelter to a private firm, unfortunately, probably a pharmaceutical company. The municipalities are making contracts with them," said N?sr?n Ç?t?r?k, general secretary of the animal protection association Dohayko, based in Adana. "But volunteers are very important in shelters because they maintain the checks and balances, that's why the cities don't want to work with them," she said. "I would rather see the worst volunteer in a shelter than the best municipal appointed staff."
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