TNR Project
TNR is the only solution for stopping this misery and continued reproduction, turning it into a death sentence for many. It’s a constant battle without many volunteers stepping up to help with this life-saving work. These two girls have helped to sterilize thousands of cats. Can you imagine how many lives they have saved? In our eyes, they are real heroes, constantly battling the streets to stop more unwanted babies from being born. Olmsteads H.O.P.E has helped support a housing project once the cats are healthy and fixed. We are in desperate need of more volunteers, experienced or not, and traps and support for more kitty housing to help with this project.
Meet Angela and Gülgün, in their words, the reality in Istanbul.
🦸🏼Angela & Gulgun🦸🏽
“When I hug a cat I feel like my soul realigns with the Universe”
Hello, fellow animal lovers, from Istanbul, the city of a million street cats. My name is Angela, I am an English teacher, translator and painter, and I simply cannot exist without a cat in my life 🙂 I am vegan – the path to a better world starts from our plates – and I feel I love animals and connect to them on the most profound emotional level. I started rescuing all living creatures I could when I was very young. I rescued ladybugs and butterflies in a nursery school, hand fed baby birds and picked up snails from the sidewalk and placed them in grass after every rain – and generally helped other sentient beings whenever I felt I could.
Today I dedicate most of my time, efforts and money to rescuing numberless street cats of Istanbul. Why do I do that rather than, say, climbing my career ladder, or hanging out with friends at cafes or travelling? – I do travel sometimes, though – My pledge is to reduce their numbers, and thus suffering, by a consistent and systematic Trap Neuter Release programme.
This is my contribution to making this city, and the world, a better place, and knowing you have palpably contributed to something much bigger than yourself is the most comforting rewarding feeling in the world! This feeling fuels up my energy and makes every day worth living. In a city of numberless, mostly unneutered and sick and hated by many, street cats it is very difficult not to get involved in volunteer animal rescuing if you have even a slightest sense of sympathy, compassion and love to animals, and help change their lives enormously by, first and foremost, spaying and neutering, fostering, treating and finding forever homes. But most of my physical, financial and emotional resources are spent on running a massive, systematic, all Istanbul encompassing TNR initiative in co-operation with Istanbul Greater Area Municipality vet services (IBB).
We set up this programme when looking for a humane, permanent solution to a nightmare of never-ending stream of sick dying kittens and exhausted by constant unnecessary births malnourished mother cats. Why expose all these poor animals to excruciating perpetual suffering and cruelty in the streets if a simple surgical interference can put an end to it all and significantly increase their life quality and chances for survival in such harsh conditions. Sterilising at private vets with our own money was not making much difference and did not get us very far, obviously. Nowadays the cost of a spaying surgery exceeds 200 euros in Turkey and there are no volunteer vets or budget vets, anything that could offer a possibility of a cheaper solution to this problem. So our, and the street cats’ only salvation is this wonderful free of charge municipality sponsored neutering programme provided by IBB.
Together with a group of like-minded, TNR-oriented animal lovers in Istanbul – mind you, there are very very few of them here, animal loving here is mostly feeding and breeding even more suffering street creatures – we approached Istanbul municipality with a a step by step plan on how to start a proper TNR programme here. And, after numerous visits and painstaking negotiations, it worked! Thanks to this programme, I, together with my friend and the best sterilization partner EVER, have sterilised thousands of cats in two years preventing enormous amounts of suffering! And seeing healthy and happy and grateful – they do feel and understand they have been rescued – cats is the most amazing rewarding feeling in the world for me!
Living is not an easy undertaking for both, humans and animals, especially animals trying to survive in harsh brutal street surroundings, so if you have something extra lying around and want to get that nice warm glow of doing something good in a dark world, this is really a great thing to support.
Any art purchased is for the rescues of
Istanbul. All work by Angela.
THE IBB STERILISATION PROJECT
When you walk around old Istanbul maze of narrow winding streets in Sultanahmet, Karakoy, Galata, Sishane, Beyazit, Gulhane etc, along the glorious banks of Bosphorus seafront promenade, the shores of Marmara sea in Florya, Yesilkoy, Bakirkoy or Kucukcekmece and see groups of beautiful healthy looking cats, look closer, almost all of them have a small notch on one of their ears, this is the sterilization mark, it means these cats were sterilized, microchipped and vaccinated by IBB Istanbul Municipality services. BUT someone has to catch all these mind-boggling amounts of cats, put them in separate carriers, secure with flexi wire and hand them over to the municipality van in the afternoon on any given previously arranged day. Municipality vets can only perform surgeries, for which we are wholeheartedly enormously grateful, but they cannot go out and spend hours and hours and hours on catching these cats, they do not have enough personnel and resources for that part of the process.
So THIS IS WHERE THE VITAL LIFE-SAVING ROLE OF VOLUNTEERS COMES INTO THE PICTURE!! This all Istanbul encompassing (and this is a huge city of 20 million) strerilisation project only bears results if co-operation with volunteers is established, volunteers catch the cats, starting very early in the morning, usually 6 am in a particular area of Istanbul, then around 1 pm in the afternoon the municipality van arrives at the location, collects already caught cats, takes them to one of the sterilization clinics (there are three of them: Gumusdere, Kisirkaya and Cebeci), surgeries are scheduled fot the next morning, the cats get stetrilised the next morning, receive post-op care at the unit staying there for a week, and in a week’s time they are returned to same locating they were collected from, and the same volunteers who caught them release them. This is how this programme works.
IT IS A COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE MUNICIPALITY AND VOLUNTEERS. The roles of both participants are equally important for this project to be a successful life-saving initiative drastically reducing the numbers and improving the lives of Istanbul street cats. This all sounds fantastic, you might think, and it could have been, except THAT THERE ARE NO VOLUNTEERS IN THE 20 MILLION CITY TO CO-OPERATE WİTH MUNICIPALITY ON THE CONTINUOS SUSTAINABLE BASIS!!
There are only two people, my friend Gulgun and me, who has been doing it systematically and devotedly for two years every week! Yes, that’s right, improbably and unbelievable as it may sound, the whole sterisation project of this colossal city relies on two volunteers capable of doing the job of dozens, if not hundreds, of people.
So almost all the beautiful fixed cats with ear notches you see all over this city have been fixed BY ONLY TWO PEOPLE! To say that these two girls are indispensably precious for the sterilization project of Istanbul is an understatement. They ARE the sterilization project.
It takes more than a year to fix one particular area, with so many cats and only two people working with them. We have to come back again and again not to leave a single female cat unfixed otherwise it is a waste of time and tremendous painstaking efforts.
We have been working in several areas simultaneously, have already cleaned a very long seafront from Kucukmece to Sarayburnu completely, and it means thousands of cats have been fixed. Sultanahmet is almost done. I am not exaggerating when I say this city would have been unlivable for a more or less sensitive person if not for our efforts. There are, for instance, only ten cats left in Yenikapi, so we have to finish it, there were hundreds, Balat and Tarlabasi are nightmarish so probably after having cleaned Sultanahmet and Yenikapi we will continue there, Kumkapi needs revision, we did it but there are new cats constantly dumped around fish restaurants.
Imagine if there were at least dozens of volunteers working in pairs just like us in lots of different areas, everything could have been so different by now, with this fantastic free service municipality is providing, but, to my greatest frustration and sadness, there are no such people who are ready to devote their time and efforts and money to this project.
