Failure to scoop up dog poop is not a victimless crime
IT happened again, the other day. Wrapping up against the last remnants of whatever the most recent storm was called, myself and the dog ventured out into the gale. There’s something quite invigorating about walking into the face of a stiff head wind while a dog scampers along beside you. In many ways, walking a dog is a form of therapy and few things are more conducive to clearing the mind than letting your pooch decide which way they want to walk, and for how long they want that walk to last.
Then, while bending down to place his doings into a pooper scooper, that dreaded, squishy feeling under my right foot – I’d just stood in a big pile of poop. Again.
Some dog walker had obviously passed that area just minutes before myself and Sam – and they obviously didn’t feel any need or desire to clean up after them.
That led to five minutes of trying to clean the mess off my shoes (good ones as well, they were a Christmas present, but now ruined) with a leaf, which merely managed to transfer the still warm and sticky and very smelly gunk from the leaves to my fingers. It was every bit as charming as it sounds.
There was also a certain symmetry in my Christmas shoes being ruined – after all, every January seems to see a marked increase of dog dirt on the path.
One can only presume that this is a direct result of people ignoring all the advice, getting a dog for Christmas, not thinking it through and not bothering to buy dog bags.
It’s not often a local councillor gets national attention for actually coming up with a sensible contribution, but Councillor Ken O’Flynn of Fianna Fáil deserves credit for once more bringing the issue into the public gaze.
The councillor recently complained about the fact that Cork has seen a mere four people fined for not cleaning up after their dog in the last 20 years.
As he puts it: “There is an epidemic in every town, city and urban district in the country.”
The phrase ‘epidemic’ may seem overblown, but it’s not mere hyperbole. After all, apart from ruining good shoes, dog poop can also contain the eggs of roundworm parasites called toxocara. Exposure can cause toxocariasis, and it’s particularly dangerous when ingested by children. That leads to blindness and paralysis and 50 kids are affected every year in the UK.
And if you’re the kind of person who couldn’t be bothered to clean up after your dog, there’s also a good chance you couldn’t be bothered to get it wormed either.
The risk of toxocariasis is often used as the main health reason why dog dirt should always be cleaned up but there are other, hidden victims about whom few of us ever think. Dog faeces is a particular bug bear of wheelchair users, and according to Mr O’Flynn: “One constituent of mine, his son is in a wheelchair and he has to have his hands disinfected by a teacher every day in school. His wheelchair is constantly gathering dog poo due to people not bothering to clean up after themselves. It’s disgraceful.”
Having your shoes messed up is an irritant, being exposed to it on a wheelchair is a genuine health hazard, as well as being a disgusting experience for the wheelchair user.
We have a strange attitude towards laws in this country – we have too many silly ones and insufficient enforcement of the sensible ones. Then, when the local authorities finally raise themselves from their slumber, they tend to make a mess of it.
For instance, Cork County Council spent €32,571 on an awareness campaign in 2016. This genius idea included ads on radio and in the cinema alongside an art competition in schools.
And it had precisely zero benefit. Of course, to the untrained it might appear that such a figure is roughly what it would have cost to hire a litter warden to actually tackle the issue on the ground.
But in the weird world of Official Ireland, launching an expensive and irrelevant art competition evidently sounds better than actually doing something concrete.
It should be pointed out that there were more than 2,000 fines issued across the country in 2016, the most recent year for figures. But only 600 of those were paid and unless a warden stumbles upon the scene of the crime at the right time, it’s virtually impossible to prove whose dog did what.
There has been talk of a DNA database for dogs, as has been tried in Germany. While that may seem an over-reaction, it actually makes sense – but when we don’t even enforce the rule that people have their dogs micro-chipped, it’s hard to see how we could organise a functioning DNA database.
The truth, of course, is that we shouldn’t need coercive laws to convince people to scoop their dog’s poop. If anything should be simple common sense, then surely this is it. But we don’t really do common sense in this country, we tend to do what we feel we can get away with.
After all, nobody would a) ever allow their child to defecate in the street and b) then walk away without cleaning it up, yet that is exactly what so many of us do with our dogs.
THIS isn’t a victimless crime, and it’s not a case of people being cranky when they complain. On top of it being rude, disgusting and a complete betrayal of the civic code of conduct which keeps a society moving smoothly, it’s an environmental nightmare.
We often think of the ‘environment’ as something so vast that we can’t do anything about it.
But the environment starts as soon as you step outside your front door – and when you let your dog take a literal dump on the street without cleaning it up, you’re metaphorically taking a dump on your own neighbours.
‘He uses a wheelchair and has to have his hands disinfected by a teacher every day’