British women clean animal shelter in Marmaris

MUĞLA - Anadolu Agency

British women living in Marmaris and Datça disinfected the shelter.

A shelter in the southwestern province of Muğla’s Marmaris district, where a number of dogs have recently died because of an epidemic illness, has been disinfected by a British women living in the region.

The Marmaris Animal Protection Association has initiated a social media campaign after 20 out of 170 stray animals at the Marmaris Municipality Animal Rehabilitation Center died of canine distemper. The campaign called for volunteers to gather at the shelter at a certain time for disinfection work, but only 10 British women living in the Marmaris and Datça districts, as well as a few association members, joined the campaign.

The women, wearing suits and masks, cleaned the places where dogs sleep and applied lime to the walls.

Speaking to the media, Marmaris Animal Protection Association Chairman Eda Ülken Tören expressed disappointment with the general indifference to the campaign. “Those who supported our campaign are foreigners. We have only a few association members. And people allegedly love animals,” Tören said.

One of the foreign women who regularly cares for animals in the shelter, Rachel Navaro, said they were fighting to keep the dogs alive, adding that more than 40 dogs had died in the shelter so far because of the epidemic. “Most of those who died were puppies and weak. We need a quarantine area in the shelter urgently. Animals brought from the street should be kept there [in quarantine] for some time. We want to make sure that the dogs accepted to the shelter are healthy,” Navaro said.

She also noted that some facilities in Marmaris kept puppies in the summer months to draw interest from tourists, but left the dogs on the stree