Deportation as an Urban Stray Dogs Management Policy: Forest Dogs of Istanbul

Abstract

The modern city, differing from other human settlements, moreover from all other habitats, is wholly organized in order to response to only one species’ -homo sapiens’- needs and desires. This exceptional habitat has also been a socio-spatial organization (re)stabilizing upon mechanisms of discipline, order, inclusion / exclusion, and clearance. The safety and security polity of the modern city, which serves to its imagined, conceived and desired - yet formal and shallow - sterility, dispatches systematically the excommunicated to the margins and / or to camps. Other animals are obviously the most invisible, most disposable and marginalized, and most silenced subjects of those mechanisms. This paper deals with one of those disposable subjects, stray dogs, in the context of a relatively new exclusion / clearance policy of urban municipalities in İstanbul -that is deportation and dumping of stray dogs to the surrounding forests. Considering the more recent local governmental projects to establish huge “concentration camps” at the outskirts of the metropolitan area, the study consequently tries to reexamine this policy of deportation as an undeclared provisional practice for an ultimate total displacement, relocation, and absolute insulation of stray animals.