CANINE ISTANBUL

The street dogs of Istanbul are notorious and omnipresent and have been around since Ottoman times. Today's packs are descendents of classic woolly Anatolian sheepdogs mixed with European breeds that roamed the streets of old Constantinople. They are a mottly bunch also interbred with abandoned pets of all kinds of descent. Front end lab, back end...hmm who knows? We see them staring mournfully at us from every street corner and rubbish skip - a dirty white pelt with a sooty nose and a tail that looks too long for the body. Not totally cute, but you get fond of them.

Some are fierce and scare the daylights out of poor Ruby: the gormless lab whose 'lets make friends' attitude doesn't always pay off with the leader of the local gang. But a lot of them are soft and lonely and crave some human attention. Many of them get it, as Istanbulites are frequently kind to their canine neighbours. The Ottomans saw them as street cleaners - part of the recycling process. Today they are part of the furniture although there are also stories of cruelty and not all are as well fed as our pups. On our first trip to the city - in searing August temperatures - we were amazed to see a woman recklessly stop her car on a busy roundabout to give a dog a drink of bottled mineral water. Actually, now we have seen drivers hurtling the wrong way down dual carriageways I suppose we would rethink 'reckless'and see this as quite routine. Funny how your definition of 'normal' shifts....

I digress....now we are practically Istanbulites ourselves we have aquired some canine contacts too. We are particularly friendly with 3 orphan pups whom we have watched grow up in their little camp beside the wall we clamber over to enter the forest near our house. They are the typical model but with some patches of brown and black that make them distinguishable one from the other and lend them the names the kids have given them - 'patch', cinammon' and 'siyah' (turkish for black)They have survived the first 6 months of life and a harsh winter courtesy of cardboard boxes for shelter and margarine tubs of puppy food provided by kind people living in the apartment block across the treacherous dual carriageway.



They adore Ruby, whom they see as a surrogate mum, and while they retreat into the woods at the site of most humans, they bowl over each other to get to us in that typically puppyish way involving big paws and long tails tangling with each other until they are a mass of writhing tummies angling for the first tickle.

The 2 boys are very timid. The bitch, who is lighter and smaller and obviously the runt, has always been sociable and bold. I am ashamed to say that Ruby's interest in them is largely dedicated to trying to steal their half eaten scraps of food and bones. She cheerfully ignores their playful advances in her attempts to trample them down en route to a good scoff.


Who is the starving street dog here? Far from being hungry and poorly cared for these pups are watched over by local people who even arranged for a vet to vaccinate them before winter set in. They have fresh water and food every day - even after snow fall. They are free to bound about the forest chasing each other and the lizards. No cooped up apartment block for them with a turn around the block once a day.Maybe not such a bad life....

We wondered whether we should bring them in to our home during the harsh winter - but to what end? Piles of poo for us and street dogs gone soft - how would they ever be returned to the wild after being domesticated. And who would want them as pets? So we enjoy the trip up the hill to visit them and are rewarded by seeing how quickly they are growing into their huge paws. Soon they'll be bigger than Rubes and we wonder how the pack will organise itself between the two males. My greatest fear is that they may stray onto the busy road, but they - like us -have to learn to cope with the fairground bumper car tactics that constitute the rules of Turkish driving. Good luck to us all!