THE BOOK

An eyewitness account of street dogs, survival, and social collapse in modern Turkey.

For years, Michelle Robertson worked alongside the people trying to keep Turkey’s street dogs alive.

Not from a distance. Not through headlines or social media clips. From inside the reality itself.

What began with food deliveries and emergency rescues became something far larger. Municipal shelters. Night collections. Dogs disappearing from familiar streets. Communities adapting to fear, pressure, exhaustion, and silence. Small acts of kindness continuing anyway.

As Turkey’s street dog crisis intensified, so did the contradictions surrounding it. Public outrage existed alongside indifference. Compassion existed alongside brutality. Some people fought to protect the animals. Others simply tried to survive the atmosphere forming around them.

The Fight For Survival is a nonfiction account drawn from those years.

Part eyewitness narrative, part documentary reflection, the book follows the lives of street dogs, shelter workers, volunteers, veterinarians, community carers, and ordinary citizens living through a period of profound social and moral tension.

It is not a story about heroes.

It is a story about survival. About what people become inside prolonged crisis. About the fragile instinct to protect life, even when systems begin moving in another direction.

From the streets of Istanbul to remote shelter compounds beyond the cities, the book explores not only what happened to Turkey’s dogs, but what those events revealed about fear, power, compassion, exhaustion, and modern public life itself.