Deanimalization: A Postmodern Strategy for Gaining Ground Through the Stray Dogs Issue

Abstract

The issue of stray dogs, despite being one of the most debated topics in Turkey, remains unresolved. A significant obstacle to the various strategies attempted by lawmakers is the "talented minority," which, aside from advocating for the adoption of stray dogs, opposes any other form of intervention and conducts propaganda efforts to this end. This study, which employs document analysis, investigates the linguistic manipulation strategies used by this minority through expressions such as "pawed friends," "street lives," and "dear friends," and examines the impact of these strategies on national media and municipalities. The findings indicate that the talented minority, united around the discourse of animal rights, readily resorts to linguistic manipulation strategies through the concepts of "pawed friends," "street lives," and "dear friends." It was found that this strategy, conceptualized as de-animalization, significantly influences both the media and municipalities. The analysis of news headlines revealed a strong tendency to replace the actual names of animals with terms like "pawed friends," "street lives," and "dear friends," which are essentially expressions of the Turkish society's love and attachment to dogs. In this context, the media has been found to function in popularizing or making these new names accepted by the public, while municipalities, in addition, perform a legitimizing role. This outcome, indicating that the media acts as a tool and municipalities are under pressure, is also facilitated by the non-binary understanding of postmodernism. In this context, it has been determined that the human-animal duality debates in Turkey are an extension or a new front of the non-binary searches of postmodern circles.