Do you sometimes wish your life was a fairytale? While we can’t promise that you’ll find a prince on a white horse or a sleeping beauty, if you feed enough stray animals you can certainly recreate some of the iconic “princess singing with animals” scenes that Disney animations love so much.
For a case in point, check out this video captured by Twitter user @cocukkilidi in Turkey. In the video, we can see a lone woman walking on a narrow street followed by a procession of dozens of animals such as dogs, cats, and lots of birds.
The Twitter user who captured and posted the video was Dilara İlter. Dilara was just visiting her mother in Turkey when she saw the fairytale parade going on underneath their window. Luckily, she managed to get plenty of footage but even if she hadn’t, her mother told her that this is actually a regular occurrence.
“The moment I saw her walking like that, I thought she was a wizard or something,” Dilara said. “My mom told me that every other day [the woman] gathers stray animals around and feeds them.”
And indeed – when Dilara visited her mother again a year later, she managed to capture a second video of the same woman and many of the same animals following her.
“The scene was so poetic,” Dilara said. “I was amazed [by] how beautiful what she was doing for these animals.”
Even though these videos were captured several years ago, Dilara shared that the daily “animal parade” is still going on.
“My mom found her and talked to her but she was too shy to talk,’ Dilara said. “The streets are full of food left out for animals. It’s pretty common in Turkey actually. Everybody loves stray animals here.”
While this seems almost magical to most westerners, it’s actually relatively common in Turkey. As we found out in a recent story about a momma cat bringing her baby to a human hospital in Turkey, people there have a very different attitude toward stray animals.
In the West, we spray and castrate stray animals to limit their populations in a humane way. In Turkey, however, stray cats and dogs are all but celebrated as they help keep port cities like Istanbul free of pests. That’s why people regularly feed them and take care of them.
This isn’t to say that everyone in Turkey always takes care of stray animals – there are always exceptions. But by and large, the attitude toward strays over there is very different.