A stray dog is seen in Ankara, Türkiye, Aug. 22, 2022. Türkiye on Tuesday blocked access to an online application intended to protect people from street dog attacks, following calls for its closure by animal rights groups which said it was misused to kill animals.(Photo by Mustafa Kaya/Xinhua)
by Burak Akinci
ANKARA, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Türkiye on Tuesday blocked access to an online application intended to protect people from street dog attacks, following calls for its closure by animal rights groups which said it was misused to kill animals.
The Havrita app, which is a map showing places with a high concentration of street dogs, was launched earlier this year by a group of activists after a series of stray dog attacks that made headlines in the country.
The app's users can upload photos of the pack of stray dogs and pinpoint their exact locations in 81 provinces of the country.
On Tuesday evening, a court in Türkiye's capital Ankara decided to deny access to the controversial app and its website following multiple legal requests, the private Demiroren News Agency reported.
Animal lovers insisted that those who want to harm or kill street dogs are also using the app. A bar association in Istanbul, Türkiye's largest city with a population of over 16 million, also planned to file a lawsuit to seek the closure of the mobile platform.
Gulsaniye Ekmekci, a lawyer who heads the Istanbul Bar Association Animal Rights Commission, told DHA that the app should be closed completely.
She cited the poisoning of 10 dogs in the southern province of Antalya after the dogs' location was tagged on the app.
Devrim Kocak, one of the activists that founded Havrita, defended the app by noting that it aims only to protect the residents from dog attacks.
According to Kocak, the app sought to address the problem of packs of dogs gathering in and near public places like hospitals, playgrounds, schools and mosques by informing the residents of the stray dogs' presence to avoid an attack.
The app's purpose is for "people who have been attacked by dog gangs to show where the incidents happened in order to avoid new attacks," she said.
Official figures show some 90,000 stray dogs in Ankara, 128,900 in Istanbul, and 450,000 in the third largest city of Izmir, Kocak said.
"Overall, we estimated that there are some 10 million stray dogs across Turkey," she added.
Nevertheless, animal lovers were outraged.
"This app should definitely be closed," Pelin Sayilgan, the Ankara representative of the Turkish Animal Right Federation, told Xinhua.
She said the reason why there were too many stray dogs in the streets of big cities was that policy makers and municipalities refuse to "pass adequate legislation to protect and neuter stray animals to reduce their population."
"Animal trade and illegal breeding should also be stopped in order to control dog population," she said, calling on the authorities to close Havrita.
Sevim Goze, who regularly feeds stray dogs and cats in and around her Yildizevler district of Ankara, said she's appalled by the fact that a mobile application, which can otherwise be helpful, is used for "bad purposes."
"Packs of dogs can be intimidating but this is not how your solve the problem of over population by killing the poor animals," she told Xinhua.
Stray animals, including dogs and cats, are ubiquitous in Türkiye where they freely roam the streets.
Though the Turkish public largely accepts the stray dogs, a spate of dog attacks, some of them very serious, triggered an outcry in the past two years.
The victims of stray dog attacks are mostly children. Though the death toll from such attacks has been low, the death of a young girl crushed by a truck while fleeing stray dogs in March in Antalya brought the issue under the spotlight again.
Animal lovers have complained that Havrita, used by malicious people targeting stray dogs, is partly responsible for the recent rising deaths of stray dogs in the country.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently called on big city municipalities such as Istanbul and Ankara to make more efforts to control the population of the stray dogs by sterilization.
Erdogan said sterilization was "essential" to address the problem. "Türkiye can pay a serious price if it does not curb the unlimited proliferation of stray animals," he said.
The Turkish leader has instructed the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry to take necessary steps, in cooperation with the city governments, to deal with the issue and protect the public's safety. ■
Stray dogs are seen in Ankara, Türkiye, Aug. 22, 2022. Türkiye on Tuesday blocked access to an online application intended to protect people from street dog attacks, following calls for its closure by animal rights groups which said it was misused to kill animals.(Photo by Mustafa Kaya/Xinhua)