But critics claim there are very few shelters in Turkey that provide adequate services to stray dogs.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has previously described shelters available for stray dogs as clean and safe environments. On the same day, Kocak said the application would be paused due to the public backlash. 1, access to the Havrita app and website were blocked. On August 22, after orders from the Ankara Criminal Judgeship of Peace no. Instead of punishing the culprits, we are now seeing that the stray dogs are held accountable,” he said. “Even though, street animals are afraid us anyway. In response, he added, people started feeling uneasy when passing stray dogs. They stopped for a while, until approximately a year ago, the same people founded a website called Basibos Kopek Sorunu ” said Gunduz was quoted as saying in the interview. “Then they went after dogs, and we, animal rights defenders and organisations, responded seriously. The campaign went by the name of Anadolu Kedisi (“Anatolian Cat”). Havrita’s founders, he said, were involved in a public campaign several years ago that targeted street cats. Guliz Gunduz, who works to help stray animals, raised concern about Havrita's past in an interview with online news platform Bianet. Havrita's founders, the media outlet reported, claimed it was not for targeting but for identifying locations, while adding that Havrita bears no responsibility for what happens to the dogs once their location is pinned on the map. GlobalVoices noted that the Havrita website is full of photographs of stray dogs with locations. The article protects people's right to live in a healthy and stable environment. In another tweet, Kocak described the app as a “user-friendly social media application” that should be protected under Article 56 of the Constitution. However, in a tweet, Kocak suggested those wanting the platform taken offline were misguided.Īccording to the pro-government Sabah newspaper, “the platform is the work of a group of activists who founded it after a high school student was killed after he was mauled by 25 stray dogs in the central province of Kayseri in 2019.”
Protesters have taken aim at the platform's spokesperson, lawyer Devrim Kocak. Head of the Animal Rights Commission of the Istanbul Bar Association, Gulsaniye Ekmekci, told Gazete Duvar how in the southern Antalya province, around eight to 10 dogs were found dead around the same locations indicated on Havrita.Īmid a growing outcry, social media users in Turkey have started a hashtag (#HavritaKapatilsin (“Shut down Havrita”)) to call for the shutting down of Havrita. This appears to have led to the surge in the number of cases of poisoned dogs. Launched in May 2022, Havrita allows the app user to share a picture of a dog and its location across all 81 provinces of Turkey. Havrita (“Bark Map”), a Turkish social media app that targets stray dogs by providing users with a mapping/location service, has come under fire after a spike in the number of poisoned street dogs.
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