If you live in a place of clean sidewalks and poo bag dispensers, you might believe this is a world where canine excrement is not an enormously foul public problem. You would be wrong.
Dogs in the United States and across the globe are using streets as their toilets and leaving the mess behind. Pedestrians are stepping in it. Children are possibly being sickened by it. Municipal sanitation departments are being burdened by it.
And so cities are devoting precious brainstorming hours to inventing ever-more-novel ways to combat it. The latest is Madrid, which this week announced a “shock plan” to force dog owners in two districts to clean up after their pets: Those caught not doing so must either spend a few days as substitute street cleaners or face a $1,700 fine.
The Spanish capital’s city hall said “there is still excrement in the streets, parks and other places” despite “repeated public awareness campaigns” and the distribution of millions of free poo bags, according to The Guardian.
In 2015, a survey carried out by a British poo bag company — based on its bag sales in 17 countries, so not terribly scientific — concluded that the French were the least likely to pick up their dogs’ waste. People in the United Kingdom were the most likely, and Americans came in third.
But if anti-dog doo campaigns are any guide, Spain, which came in seventh, has an epic battle on its hands. In 2015, the city of Tarragona announced a plan to use DNA testing to match droppings to dogs (a tactic that many American apartment buildings also employ). Before that, the town of Colmenar Viejo dispatched a private detective to record videos of offending dog owners, who were then fined by police.
In 2013, Brunete, a suburb of Madrid, boxed up dog feces and mailed it to scofflaw owners. For two weeks, volunteers spied on dog walkers, sidled up to those who didn’t scoop and asked the name of the pooch — which, because most were registered with the city, was usually enough information to determine the owner’s address. Mayor Borja Gutierrez told the New York Times that the problem was the No. 1 constituent complaint, and that the mail-bombs had improved things by 70 percent.
“It’s your dog, it’s your dog poop. We are just returning it to you,” Gutierrez said.
The struggle continues, and the tactics grow more desperate.
In 2013, Bristol, England, put up posters of a toddler, her face smeared with something brown, next to an image of dog doo. The caption: “Children will put anything in their mouths.” Volunteers in Corvallis, Ore., spray painted poop orange. Authorities in Taiwan gave lottery tickets to people who turned in their bags of dog excrement.
