A Turkish province has made it an offence to put food out for a street animal, with police and gendarmerie conducting inspections. India took a different route, and on paper a better one. The problem is that India never finished the job.
What Erzurum has done
On 25 September, the Provincial Animal Protection Board in Erzurum, in eastern Turkey, banned the feeding of stray animals across the entire province. The decision was taken at a meeting chaired by Governor Aydın Baruş.
The board’s stated reasoning was that feeding animals on the streets could cause them to “establish breeding and living areas.”
The enforcement machinery attached to it is unusually heavy for a rule about leaving out food:
- District municipalities will monitor compliance.
- Neighbourhood heads must notify the relevant municipality whenever stray animals are identified in their area.
- Police and gendarmerie units will conduct inspections across the province and are instructed to notify district municipalities “immediately” when animals are found.
- District governors’ offices must report the work carried out each month to the Erzurum Directorate of Nature Conservation and National Parks.
In the same decision, the board suspended operations at the animal shelter run by the Pasin Ovası Municipalities Union until it complies with regulations. Its six member municipalities will use the Erzurum Metropolitan Municipality shelter in the meantime.
Note what is absent from that list. There is no designated place where feeding remains permitted. The ban is total.
The context behind the ban
This decision did not appear out of nowhere. It sits inside a national shift in how Turkey handles street dogs.
Amendments to Turkey’s Animal Protection Law adopted in 2024 require municipalities to remove unowned street dogs to shelters and keep them there until they are adopted. Animal rights advocates have called the legislation a “massacre law,” warning that confining animals in inadequate facilities would kill them.
Those warnings have not gone unanswered. The Union of Turkish Bar Associations stated in April that dogs had died because of inadequate health care and conditions in shelters, and reported cases of neglect and mistreatment including starvation, improper transportation and inadequate care.
Erzurum has been at the sharp end of this. In November 2025, the province’s then governor announced that all stray animals in Erzurum and its districts had been collected and the number brought “down to zero.”
Set against that history, a province-wide feeding ban reads less like a population management measure and more like the final step in clearing animals from public space. As one international welfare bulletin observed after the announcement: removing access to food does not remove the animals themselves.
What India actually decided, and why it is not the same
It would be easy to look at Erzurum and conclude India has done something similar. It hasn’t, and the difference matters.
On 22 August 2025, a three-judge Supreme Court bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and NV Anjaria issued directions on stray dog management that now apply nationwide. The bench was modifying an earlier order of 11 August by a two-judge bench, which had directed that stray dogs picked up in Delhi-NCR should not be released and should instead be kept in shelters. The three-judge bench held that approach was too harsh and inconsistent with the Animal Birth Control Rules.
The key elements of the order:
- Stray dogs picked up must be sterilised, dewormed and vaccinated, then released back into the same locality — except dogs infected with rabies, suspected of infection, or displaying aggressive behaviour, which are to be kept separately.
- Feeding stray dogs on streets and in public places is prohibited.
- Municipal authorities must create dedicated feeding spaces in every municipal ward, with the feeding area identified according to the stray dog population in that ward.
- The directions were extended pan-India, tied to compliance with the Animal Birth Control (ABC) Rules, 2023, with a national policy on stray dog management to be framed.
The structure is fundamentally different from Erzurum’s. Turkey’s rule says do not feed. India’s says feed here, not there. One removes the animals’ food source with no alternative. The other relocates feeding to managed sites while keeping the dogs sterilised, vaccinated and in their own territory.
On paper, India chose the better design. That is worth stating plainly, because it is the approach most animal welfare science supports.
The part India got wrong
The design only works if the feeding zones exist. Largely, they do not.
A ground inspection in Delhi found that of 292 designated dog feeding spots, only 14 were functional. That is under five per cent.
The placements that do exist have drawn criticism. One feeding point near Gate No. 3 of Jangpura Metro station was described by locals as a “messy corner,” littered with garbage and stones, with a board declaring it an official feeding point put up only recently. Another, near Gate No. 17 of Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, sits at the centre of a roundabout, a location residents say poses obvious safety risks.
The distribution is also uneven. West Zone has 60 feeding points and Najafgarh Zone 54, while Central Zone has just four, all clustered around Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, and Sadar Paharganj has eight.
Bengaluru only began the identification exercise after the order, with BBMP instructing staff to identify spots in consultation with feeders and local community representatives, targeting low-footfall locations.
So here is the situation an Indian community feeder is in. Feeding on the street is prohibited. The designated alternative either does not exist in her ward, or exists on paper, or exists in a spot no sensible person would use.
In practice, that is not very far from Erzurum. The difference is that Turkey arrived there by policy and India arrived there by failing to implement its own court order.
What this means if you feed street dogs in India
A few points worth being clear about.
The order restricts where you feed, not whether you feed. The Supreme Court did not outlaw caring for community dogs. It targeted feeding at random spots on streets, near building entrances and in parks, where it creates conflict with residents and pedestrians.
Your municipality is obliged to create a feeding spot. Under the ABC Rules, 2023, designated feeding spaces are to be identified in consultation with feeders. If your ward has none, that is a failure of the municipal body, and it is something you can formally push for rather than simply absorb.
Sterilisation and return remain the law. Dogs picked up must be sterilised, vaccinated and returned to the same locality. Blanket removal to shelters is not permitted, which is precisely the distinction between the Indian and Turkish positions.
Push for sensible placement. A feeding point on a traffic roundabout serves nobody. Feeders and RWAs have a legitimate role in identifying locations with low footfall, away from gates, stairwells and children’s play areas.
Why the comparison is worth making
There is a reason to watch Turkey closely rather than dismiss it as a distant policy story.
Both countries are working through the same underlying tension: large free-ranging dog populations, genuine public anxiety after bite incidents, overstretched municipal systems, and passionate feeders caught between the animals and the authorities. Both have reached for national-level intervention.
Turkey resolved that tension by clearing the streets. The consequences are documented, shelters over capacity, deaths from inadequate care, and now a ban on so much as leaving out food.
India resolved it by ordering sterilise-vaccinate-return plus managed feeding. That is the humane answer, and it is already binding law. But a humane policy that exists only in a judgment is not a humane policy. It is a promise.
Fourteen functional feeding points in the national capital is not compliance. It is the gap where the policy should be, and it is the gap into which the conflict, and eventually the animals, will fall.
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