Animal Protection Policy in Turkey

Given the literature on the protection of animals, we find that the beginnings of discussions in this field in Turkey date back to the 19th century. The modernization process began to make the mechanism of protection of animals vulnerable, and the then public authorities legitimized violence against animals by using hate speech. Since the 1980s, ineffective legislation has exacerbated the problem, and this process entered a new phase with the passage of the Animal Protection Law (Law 5199, 2004).The public policy developed for animals in Turkey is far from the legal axis. In Turkish legislation, animals are defined as “property†or “commodity.†The public authority has not developed policies for animal rights at the level of regulations and decisions. Moreover, the confusion of powers and duties in the institutional structure directly affects the process of the protection of animals. The ineffectiveness of legal measures for the protection of animals in Turkey is reflected in the organizational structure of both central and local authorities. The coordination of this structure at the local level is carried out by the Provincial Animal Protection Committee. The inadequate organization of the committee’s powers and functions makes it difficult to enact specific regulations and take action to protect animals.The study consists of three parts. The first part deals with the one-hundred-year history of the development of animal protection in the Ottoman and Republican periods. The second part analyzes the model of animal protection policy in Turkey. The third part discusses the administrative and legal structure underlying the legal functioning.