When Care Faces Violence: Experience of Anticipatory Grief, Chronic Vigilance, Ambiguous Loss and Resentment Among Caregivers for Street Dogs—A Qualitative Study from Istanbul

Legislative changes introduced in Turkey in 2024, aimed at removing street dogs from public space, have reshaped volunteer caregiving in Istanbul and reconfigured human–animal rela-tionships beyond the household. Drawing on 43 in-depth interviews and eight months of quali-tative fieldwork, this article examines how caregivers sustain daily care for free-living dogs while navigating legal uncertainty, intensified encounters with municipal and state actors, and frag-mented pathways to assistance. Caregiving is described as increasingly governed by chronic vigilance, anticipatory grief, and moral distress—conditions that do not remain “emotional” side effects but operate as practical forces that reorganize routine, visibility, and thresholds for in-tervention. Focusing on caregivers’ everyday experiences of governance and their interactions with municipal services, shelters, and private veterinary clinics (without reporting operational tactics), the analysis shows how responsibility shifts toward continuous risk management, with care narrowing to what feels survivable under threat. A central finding is an infrastructural bot-tleneck in veterinary pathways: many clinics can treat dogs but cannot provide short-term holding, interrupting recovery and turning time-sensitive cases into emergencies. I argue that caregiver well-being is constitutive of animal welfare, shaping continuity of monitoring, access to first aid, and everyday conflict mediation that enables coexistence. The article contributes to interdisci-plinary debates on animal welfare governance by foregrounding volunteer caregiving as an in-formal yet indispensable urban care infrastructure whose capacity is co-produced with veterinary actors and constrained by institutional opacity and weak bridging arrangements between street, clinic, and recovery.