Killable beyond the wall: a transcarceral necrogeography of street dogs in Istanbul

Abstract

Abstract

Between 2016 and 2019, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality seized tens of thousands of street dogs, drove them to the city’s southeastern edge, and shut many inside the Stray Animal Temporary Rehabilitation Center in Ballıca. The Center’s name promises care; in practice it confines dogs, kills them out of sight, and disposes of the unnamed in unmarked ground. Drawing on thirty-nine months of multispecies ethnographic fieldwork, I follow the dogs’ deaths across Ballıca, not the Center alone, where a whole peri-urban geography becomes a landscape of canine dying. I read what is done to these dogs as a contemporary decanisation: the administrative making of ungrievable canine life through removal, confinement, abandonment, and slow peripheral death. Working across animal geographies, necropolitics, and carceral geography, the article develops a transcarceral necrogeography of the ungrievable, in which the Center is not a bounded killing site but one node in a continuum whose logic runs outward through abandonment and roadside death. The case also strains the caring-killing paradox. In Istanbul, killing healthy street dogs was unlawful under the 2004 Animal Protection Law, yet at the Center it continued, held in place by concealment and institutional silence that make the paradox jurisdictional as much as affective.