Cognitive Diets and Community Cats: A neurologist walks through Istanbul (#475)

I went to Istanbul to talk about old dogs’ brains and came home thinking mostly about cats.

Back in May 2002, Hill’s Pet Nutrition put together a European speaker tour on Neurological Problems of Old Dogs. Seven talks, each about ninety minutes long, marching across the map: Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Istanbul, Toulouse, Paris, and beyond.

At the time, Hill’s had just launched a new therapeutic diet, Prescription Diet b/d, the first commercial food designed specifically to address canine brain aging and cognitive dysfunction.

My job was to explain to veterinarians

that just getting old wasn’t a diagnosis.

Senior dogs who were pacing at night, getting lost in familiar rooms, or staring at walls weren’t being difficult; their brains were changing.

Hill’s b/d was built around a then-innovative idea: that an antioxidant-rich diet, with mitochondrial co-factors and omega-3s, might slow some of that decline and help aging dogs stay more alert, learn better, and remain themselves for a little longer.

So, I arrived in Istanbul with slides on oxidative stress and free radicals, and walked straight into Catstanbul.

Catstanbul: Where everyone shares the city

Istanbul is often described as the city where continents shake hands, one foot in Europe and the other in Asia. But for me, the more striking thing was how humans and animals seemed to share the same living room.

Cats. Everywhere.

They lounged on car roofs and windowsills. They threaded calmly through café tables. They slept on mosque steps, turned shop displays into beds, and claimed entire park benches as personal property. People stepped around them the way you do around a chair that has always been there.

The cats weren’t quite strays in the way we usually mean it, nor were they conventional pets. They occupied a third category: community animals. Jointly owned by everyone and no one. Neighbors put out bowls of food and water. Small shelters appeared in doorways and courtyards. Children stopped to stroke them; shopkeepers slipped them scraps of fish.

I later learned that this casual, everyday care has structure behind it. Each municipal district has a veterinary department that provides services for street animals, including free neutering for community cats, and many private clinics offer discounted care that local residents help pay for.

The relationship runs deep historically, too. In Ottoman times there were even professional cat sitters (mancacı) whose job was to feed the city’s cats, funded by local foundations.

And centuries before that, merchant ships arriving from across the Mediterranean and beyond brought working cats to keep the rats at bay, many of whom disembarked and never looked back.

When you walk through a city that has quietly decided, over generations, that its street animals are worth feeding, sterilizing, and medically treating, you feel it. The place softens around the edges.

A hard city with a soft underlay

Istanbul is not an easy city, at least not on the surface. Fifteen million people, steep hills, frantic traffic, layers of history piled one on top of another: Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, modern Turkish. Ferries nose across the Bosphorus. The call to prayer pours over rooftops. Streets are full of sound: vendors, horns, construction, conversation.

And in the middle of all that sensory overload, a cat will simply hop up beside you on a park bench and fall asleep.

I had that experience. I’d spent the morning talking about cognitive decline in dogs. About owners heartbroken because their old companion seemed not quite there anymore. I headed out into the city. After climbing up towards Galata Tower and weaving through back streets, I sat down to rest and take it all in. A cat appeared, as if emerging from the stone itself, curled up next to me and started purring.

In the quiet presence of a cat, you can feel your own nervous system reset. Your breathing slows. For a moment, you’re not a visiting speaker or a tourist or a neurologist; you’re just a warm, stationary object that a cat has chosen to trust.

In a city built of concrete, glass, and steel the cats are small points of softness. They insist that the city make room for another species, and the city has said yes.

Brain food, old dogs, and what Istanbul taught me

Inside the lecture hall in 2002, we were talking about data. Studies showing that dogs fed an antioxidant- and co-factor enriched diet like b/d performed better on learning and memory tasks than control dogs, and that their rate of cognitive decline could be slowed. We were starting to talk seriously about canine cognitive dysfunction syndrome as a condition in need of diagnosis, management, and empathy.

Today, Hill’s brain-focused nutritional work has evolved. Where b/d once stood alone as the brain diet, the company has moved towards broader formulations that tackle multiple geriatric issues at once. Brain aging plus arthritis, for example. Current diets incorporate newer science around the gut microbiome. But the core idea remains the same:

Older dogs deserve targeted, thoughtful care that helps keep their minds clear and their lives worth living for as long as possible.

Walking through Istanbul, I kept coming back to a simple contrast:

• In the clinic, we try to protect animals from the world: controlled lighting, controlled noise, carefully measured diets, structured enrichment.

  
  

• In Catstanbul, the city itself becomes the environment of care. There are no individual owners responsible for every detail. Instead, there is a loose but powerful social agreement:

  
  

We will make space for these animals,

and we will not look away from them.

It made me think differently about older dogs with cognitive problems. They can become invisible very quickly. Shut into spare rooms at night so they won’t wander, left at home when they can’t cope with the park anymore, described as too much trouble.

We do our best with medications and diets and behavior strategies, but what they really need is something Istanbul understands instinctively:

A community willing to keep including them,

even when they’re inconvenient.

A city that stops to feed its cats is practicing, in small daily gestures, the same kind of kindness we ask owners to show their aging dogs.

The city that purrs in memory

A lot has changed since that 2002 lecture tour. The science of brain aging has moved forward. Hill’s has updated and re-badged its diets. Other companies have launched their own cognitive-support foods and supplements. Our language about old dogs has become more precise and, I hope, more compassionate.

What hasn’t changed is the picture that comes to mind when someone mentions Istanbul.

I remember the Bosphorus ferries and the Blue Mosque, the spice markets and the endless tea.

But most of all, I remember that feeling of turning a corner and always finding a cat somewhere in the frame. Asleep on a prayer rug. Surveying the street from a balcony. Sharing a plastic chair with an old man in a cap.

I went there to talk about preserving memory in dogs. The irony is that the city has preserved itself in mine, filed under Catstanbul, a place where a great, complicated metropolis made room for thousands of small, watchful lives.

If you ever find yourself there, do what I did after my last talk. Close the laptop. Walk out into the streets. And let a cat decide where you sit.

The city, and its quiet citizens with tails, will teach you the rest.

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