Abandoned dogs from Turkey find homes in St. Louis
ST. LOUIS
Dog rescue groups in as many as 15 states in the U.S. are trying to find homes for Turkey’s street dogs, including a group in St. Louis.
Jan Knoche is the president of Love a Golden Rescue, a St. Louis volunteer organization that rescues golden retrievers. The group began working two years ago to transport and find new homes for Turkey’s street dogs, especially abandoned golden retrievers, KSDK-TV reported .
Turkey has many homeless dogs and not enough room in shelters for all of them, partially as a result of people buying puppies and then dumping them when they grow up, Knoche said.
“Since the fall of 2015, we’ve brought 30 dogs over [to St. Louis]. They come and they don’t look so good when they get here and they turn into beautiful dogs,” Knoche told The Associated Press.
Carla and Michael Sloss adopted Augie in Missouri two months ago. Augie was one of the street dogs volunteers with Love a Golden Rescue brought back to the U.S.
“He comes all the way from Turkey and he even has his own passport,” Carla Sloss said.
Augie traveled more than 9,000 kilometers, from Istanbul to Chicago, and then on to St. Louis. Carla Sloss initially worried that a dog raised in Turkey wouldn’t understand commands in English.
“There was not a language barrier at all,” she said. “Love is a universal language.”
Abandoned Golden Retrievers living on the streets of the Aegean holiday resort town of Marmaris are also being sent to England to be adopted as part of an initiative carried out by Jeannie Thirkill, a Scottish town resident.
In England, the cost of adopting a dog from Turkey is 1,000 pounds (approximately 4,160 Turkish Liras) per dog, she told Doğan News Agency last year.
This price includes the dog’s flight ticket, health tests and a four-month quarantine period.
