Marble Falls I’m on the record in Nuts and Bolts on stray dogs as a ubiquitous issue around the world for community organizers, along with garbage pickup and bad drainage. I argued that if we could build organizations that could campaign and win on these three issues, we could organize the world. All of which made me jump on a recent column in the Times like, well, a dog on a bone.
The columnist was talking about stray dogs in Turkey, where he argues they are pretty much a fact of life in Istanbul and other cities. It seems that the autocratic leader of Turkey, President Recep Erdogan, has now seized on the issue. To great fanfare, he proposed a plan to upgrade shelters and, in some cases, kill the dogs, allowing opponents in favor of sterilization to call this the “euthanization bill.” The columnist thinks…
…this is not really about the dogs. Erdogan long ago mastered the art of scapegoating. In his more than 20 years in power, he has pointed to intellectuals, journalists, refugees and others as the source of Turkey’s troubles. With the economy faltering and after a poor showing in spring municipal elections, he and his party have again been looking for somewhere to redirect people’s ire.
Maybe he’s right, but give the devil his due: loose dogs are an issue you can run on quite a long way. I was a little surprised he’s gotten the play he has though with an estimate of only 4 million stray dogs. PETA estimates there are 70 million strays in the United States on any given day, although they throw cats in the mix with the dogs, so they may be more to blame. The American novelist Jonathan Franzen made a convincing case in The New Yorker that cats were a worse menace because of their massacre of birds, but, honestly, I can’t remember our members raising that as a neighborhood issue in the same way. China supposedly has 40 million stray dogs. India, having a large street dog population, estimated at around 35-40 million, accounts for 36% of the world’s rabies deaths, making it a lot more than a nuisance there.
See what I mean? These are almost ready-made campaigns any community organizer around the world can pull off the shelf in building an organization. To my surprise there turn out to be exceptions, including where we are organizing like the Netherlands, where we are currently launching. The country claims “the stray dog population is completely under control [and] no longer has any stray dogs on its streets at all….” In Seoul, South Korea, where we have on and off hoped to get something going, we can’t count on the dogs to help us get traction either. Statistics indicate “… the number of abandoned dogs captured in Seoul, South Korea from 2011 to 2017. In 2017, there were 153 stray dogs caught in Seoul, increased from 115 dogs in the previous year.”
How did the Netherlands do it? There’s a long history that started with a rabies outbreak in the 19th century, but that’s not all. They issued a dog tax and have especially targeted “puppy mills.” They were the first country in the world to set up an animal protection agency. They charge fines of up to $20,000 with three years in jail for animal cruelty. All of this freed up space in shelters and forced cultural changes. The Netherlands created the first animal police force to ensure compliance. There’s even a political party dedicated to animals.
Duplicating the Netherlands experience would be something a whole lot bigger than a local group campaign, but looking at what they have achieved might create a mighty large national or even global organization. Like I said earlier, an organization tackling this issue could run a long, long way on four legs.