Q&A: LEAP Student Grantee Sarina Fereydooni Discusses Ethics of Turkey’s Stray Dog Law

Sarina Fereydooni is a senior at Yale College majoring in political science and pursuing a certificate in global health. She is a recipient of a 2025 Student Grant from the Law, Environment & Animals Program (LEAP) at Yale Law School. Her research project, “Animal Ethics and Islamic Jurisprudence: Legal Interpretations and Policy Impacts in Contemporary Turkey,” explores how divergent Islamic interpretations of animal ethics are shaping contemporary legal and political approaches to animal welfare. She focuses on Turkey’s recent law mandating the removal of stray dogs from public spaces as a case study at the intersection of religion, law, and public policy. Fereydooni discusses her research in this Q&A.

Could you tell us about Turkey’s recent legislation ordering the removal of stray dogs from public health? What narratives accompanied the law?

In July 2024, Turkey’s parliament amended Animal Protection Law No. 5199 to require municipalities to capture stray dogs and confine them in shelters. The law states that authorities should offer healthy, non-aggressive dogs for adoption, while permitting euthanasia for animals that are terminally ill, in severe pain, or deemed to “pose a health risk to humans.” In practice, officials can interpret the “health risk” category broadly. They can classify aggression or certain breeds as threats, which expands state discretion and worries animal welfare advocates.

Policymakers framed the law primarily through public safety and public health narratives. Officials highlighted highly publicized dog attacks, raised fears about rabies, and described a need to restore order in public space. President Erdoğan and allied voices cast the existing system as a failure of governance and suggested that urban elites normalized stray dogs at the expense of ordinary citizens’ safety. 

Could you talk more about the intersection of religion with animal rights and animal welfare in Turkey and in other Muslim-majority states?

My research shows that Islamic ethics contain multiple strands that shape how communities discuss dogs. Islamic scripture and hadith emphasize mercy (raḥma) and moral accountability toward animals. Many Muslims cite stories of divine punishment for cruelty and divine forgiveness for compassion when they reason about animal welfare. At the same time, Islamic jurisprudence includes doctrines of ritual purity that classify dogs, especially their saliva, as najis, or ritually impure. Although jurists developed these rules for ritual contexts, communities have often extended them into social attitudes, sometimes producing stigma toward dogs that people frame in religious terms.

In this case, the government largely avoided explicit Islamic legal reasoning and instead relied on technocratic public health frames, even as culturally embedded ideas about impurity shaped public perception. Meanwhile, critics of the law built an unexpected coalition. Secular animal-rights activists and religious conservatives invoked Islamic traditions of mercy and stewardship to argue that mass killing violates divine authority and humanity’s duty to protect vulnerable creatures.

As part of this project, you conducted interviews with scholars and activists at the intersection of religion, law, and animal rights in Turkey. What were the most notable findings from these interviews?

Many interviewees situated the legislation within what they see as the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP’s) increasingly securitized and order-oriented style of governance. They described the law as consistent with that trajectory. At the same time, they emphasized that street animals occupy a distinctive place in everyday Turkish life. People interact daily with dogs and cats across lines of class, ideology, and religiosity. That shared coexistence gives street animals civic meaning and creates a rare zone of moral overlap in an otherwise polarized environment.

Interviewees also emphasized fear and anticipation. Even when they lacked confirmed evidence of mass killings at the time of interviews, many believed that large-scale euthanasia would follow implementation because shelter shortages and discretionary enforcement create pressure to eliminate animals quickly. The law therefore produced a political rupture even before full implementation. It transformed latent unease into visible protest and reframed animal welfare as a proxy for broader anxieties about compassion, governance, and the erosion of shared civic norms.

You frame Turkey’s stray dog legislation as a case where public health rhetoric may mask deeper political and religious motivations. Could you talk more about the relationship between public health and Turkey’s law? Are there public health risks from stray dogs, and is Turkey’s law a reasonable response to those public health risks?

Stray dog management raises real public health concerns, especially when municipalities fail to implement consistent vaccination, sterilization, and bite-prevention programs. Turkish officials have emphasized dog attacks and rabies risks and have presented the amendments as an urgent response to those dangers.

However, the way officials invoke public health matters. In the 2024 debate, the government foregrounded safety and order while avoiding explicit Islamic legal reasoning. That strategy allowed the state to claim technocratic neutrality while implicitly drawing on culturally embedded discomfort about dogs. Whether the law provides a reasonable response depends on feasibility and proportionality. Turkey has millions of stray dogs but only a fraction of that number in shelter capacity, which creates structural pressure for euthanasia to become routine. Religious authorities have not endorsed unrestricted killing. The Diyanet has affirmed mercy and has limited euthanasia to cases of incurable illness or genuine threats to human life. This ambivalence underscores my broader point. Policymakers can use public health language to expand discretionary state power, even when Islamic ethics could just as plausibly constrain it.

Based on your research so far, are there any policy recommendations you would make?

Based on my research so far, I hesitate to offer a simple policy prescription because the core issue is not just animal control, but the political and moral framing of the problem itself. The legislation sits at the intersection of public health, religious sensibilities, municipal capacity, and cultural polarization. Any recommendation that treats this as purely a technical question risks missing the deeper dynamics that are actually driving the conflict.

What I would emphasize instead is the need for policy clarity and transparency. Before expanding sheltering or euthanasia practices, municipalities would need accurate population data, clear standards for what constitutes a “public health risk,” and independent oversight to prevent discretionary abuse. My research suggests that the greatest danger is not one specific model of stray management, but the expansion of state discretion without moral or institutional constraint.