Turgutlu, Turkey – news/opinion article: Ikram Korkmazer’s butcher’s shop has become a tourist attraction after three years of feeding stray cats and dogs and recording it all on video and publishing it on social media, specifically his Instagram page.
I guess this has brought in more business. It is an example of positive karma. Be nice to animals and you’ll be rewarded. I think he has developed the social media image by placing a cardboard cut-out of a cat standing up at his meat display! This comes from a video which went viral about a year ago.
The video below shows one of the cats waiting to be fed outside his shop. Of course, he feeds them raw meat which is an interesting issue which Ikram is unaware of. He’s being nice and kind to these strays which I love to see but if these cats only eat the meat provided by Ikram it is likely that they’ll become ill because you need to add supplements to straight meat to make it balanced for a cat. That’s the basis of a raw diet for cats.
It does not contain all the required nutrients for cat health because it is butchered flesh and not the whole animal. Stray cats eat the whole mouse which is a balanced diet. Ikram feeds raw muscle only.
That said I’ll presume that the cats eat from other sources to add to their diet to make it more balanced. These strays are classic ‘community cats’. They are part of the shopkeeping community.
I am not being critical. I am praising the man. It is just that he is unaware that his cat diet does not contain all the nutrients a stray cat needs.
According to the Mirror online website he feeds seven to eight dogs and three to four cats every day who wait at his front door. You can see a couple of dogs taking up home outside the source of food. Here is a picture of an ecstatic dog about to be fed by Korkmazer. He goes wild with anticipation:
Sources of food are the makings of a cat colony. I’d expect more cats to start turning up. I wonder if Ikram is concerned about the possibility of an unmanageable number of cats participating in his generosity?
It is really nice to see though. It also makes me go back a step or two and ask myself if they have TNR in this part of Turkey and how concerned cat owners are with spaying and neutering. In other words, what does the average Turkish person living in Turkey do to avoid stray and feral cats being created?
On another note, Turkey has a long history of a good relationship with the domestic cat. The Turkish Van and Angora go back centuries and they have mosques were strays are welcome.
He also has TikTok and YouTube pages. He spreads his fame far and wide. That is sensible. But he has to continually feed these channels with fresh videos. That’s a responsibility. At the same time he has to run his butcher’s shop π.
SOME ARTICLES ON THE REAL TURKISH ANGORA:
