The Mayor of Akyaka invited Perihan Agnelli Chair of Fethiye Friends of Animals Association to talk to school kids about animal welfare and how they can help.

Perihan writes:

I received a call from the Mayor of Akyaka, which is a tourist town about 2  hours drive from Fethiye in the direction of Marmaris, asking me if I would give a talk to the local school-children.

Akyaka is one of the very first towns we visited outside of Fethiye with our Mobile Clinic to encourage them to start their own neutering program.

A handful of local people became active in having their stray dogs brought to our Centre for neutering and then taking them back to Akyaka, so whilst they weren’t able to have their own vet and clinic, the Mayor at that time realised the need to have a stray animal management program.

As education is an important aspect, when the Mayor asked me to give a talk to the children I was very pleased to do so.

A class of 60 children in the 11 to 13 age-group assembled in the hall to be shown a Power Point presentation which we use extensively for school education.

It was prepared by a Scottish vet, Karen Ozel, from Denizli and has proven to be very popular with the children as it requires a lot of response from them on the way to understand about animal welfare.

It is also used by our colleagues in Istanbul, who are very active there in school education.

The Akyaka school children were very attentive and participated loudly in the talk.

One of the questions was what method was the best for controlling the numbers of street dogs? I pointed to a boy who had raised his hand and his answer was ‘Poisoning’!

I told him to come to the front (joking of course), but he wouldn’t budge from his seat!! 

However, the children now have a good idea of what neutering means and the hour long talk for normally restive children was well received by them.

Hopefully they now have a better understanding of what animal welfare means.

You can find out more about the Fethiye Friends of Animals Association at their website.