# When Care Faces Violence: Anticipatory Grief, Chronic Vigilance, and Ambiguous Loss Among Street Dog Care-Givers in Istanbul

## TL;DR

This study explores how volunteers in Istanbul caring for street dogs cope with legal changes and uncertain outcomes, impacting their emotional well-being and caregiving practices.

## Contribution

The study introduces the concept of 'living in pre-loss' and identifies a recurring veterinary bottleneck in animal welfare governance.

## Key findings

- Caregivers experience chronic vigilance, anticipatory grief, and ambiguous loss due to uncertainty about municipal responses.
- Legal changes shift caregiving toward risk management, narrowing interventions due to fears of complaints and scrutiny.
- A recurring bottleneck in veterinary care forces caregivers to improvise recovery spaces, affecting animal welfare outcomes.

## Abstract

Many studies of human–animal relationships focus on pets in the home, but in Istanbul thousands of bonds are formed and sustained in public space through unpaid community caregiving. This qualitative study examines how volunteers who care for free-roaming street dogs experience daily life after Turkey’s 2024 amendment to the Animal Protection Law, which intensified pressure to remove dogs from streets. Based on 43 in-depth interviews with caregivers and five months of fieldwork, the article shows how care becomes shaped by uncertainty about municipal responses and the risk that seeking help can lead to capture or confinement. Caregivers describe living with constant vigilance, anticipatory grief, and ambiguous loss when dogs disappear or are taken without confirmation. These pressures often shift caregiving from open-ended commitment toward ongoing risk management. The study also identifies a recurring welfare bottleneck: many private clinics can treat street dogs but cannot provide short-term holding for recovery, forcing caregivers to improvise temporary spaces and turning treatable cases into emergencies. Overall, the findings show that caregiver well-being, institutional design, and veterinary capacity are tightly linked to urban animal welfare and the possibility of humane coexistence beyond the household.

This article examines how Turkey’s 2024 amendment to the Animal Protection Law reshapes volunteer caregiving for free-roaming dogs in Istanbul by reconfiguring the practical conditions under which care is sought, coordinated, and sustained. Drawing on 43 in-depth interviews and five months of fieldwork (1 July–30 November 2025), this study combines constructivist grounded theory with reflexive thematic analysis to trace how legal change is encountered through everyday governance interfaces and how these encounters reorganize caregivers’ routines, capacities, and moral worlds. The analysis yields four interlocking findings. First, caregivers describe a temporality of “living in pre-loss,” in which anticipated removal, disappearance, and uncertain outcomes generate chronic vigilance, anticipatory grief, and ambiguous loss without closure. Second, caregiving is increasingly recalibrated as risk management: commitments persist, but intervention narrows through heightened exposure to complaints, reputational scrutiny, and fears that help-seeking may backfire. Third, institutional pathways—hotlines, shelter intake, and municipal responses—are experienced as discretionary and opaque, producing a fluctuating threshold between assistance and harm that conditions whether caregivers engage official systems at all. Fourth, this study identifies a recurring veterinary bottleneck at the street–clinic–recovery handover, where limited short-term holding capacity stalls treatment trajectories and displaces recovery labor into precarious domestic and informal spaces. Together, these findings argue that caregiver well-being is not ancillary to animal welfare governance but constitutive of it. It shapes the continuity of monitoring, the timeliness of intervention, and the everyday mediation through which coexistence is maintained under intensified legal and political pressure.