LAST week's half-term holiday brought the year's first blast of sunshine and the heady scent of spring to my neck of the woods.
No, I'm not talking about the half-forgotten smell of daffodils on the breeze. Or the sweet aroma of freshly cut grass. I refer, rather, to the rancid whiff of dog's dirt lodged deep in the crevices of trainers. This, for me, evokes the first stirrin
gs of the new season more vividly than dew on the morning grass or the appearance of Creme Eggs in the shops.
My family's first dog dirt dousing of 2008 was a particularly repellent one. We were running late for the dentist, as usual, so we parked as close as possible to the gate. All we had to do was cross a few feet of pavement and we would make it on time. I saw the still-steaming pile fractionally too late. As I opened my mouth to shout a warning, the foot of son number two (if you'll pardon the pun) was already hovering directly above its epicentre.
And so it was that I finally arrived at reception, a malodorous and beleaguered pack-horse, with a one-trainered seven-year-old on my back and a kicking, squealing three-year-old tucked under my arm.
Having clamped my mouth (understandable given my fraught state), my sympathetic dentist went on to share his view that dog owners who fail to scoop the poop ought to be forced to eat it – an opinion at odds with my normally liberal take on crime and punishment, but one with which, at that moment, I could only mutely concur.
Imagine my delight when I read just hours later that the denizens of our capital city share my extreme stance on this issue. Faced with a litany of complaints on this subject, Edinburgh City Council is bringing in a mobile CCTV unit which will stalk and record errant dog owners, then fine them £50 for their behaviour. Fantastic. If only they would name and shame the culprits – perhaps even publish footage of them caught in flagrante – we would be getting close to justice.
Or perhaps we could follow the lead set by that bastion of civil liberties, the Isle of Man, where the police have set up a DNA database for dogs so that whenever an owner forgets to clean up, the deposits can be tested and traced back to the dog. Better still, councils could deploy those devices that emit high-pitched noise to disperse teenagers on our four-footed friends, to evict them from public spaces.
How things have changed. Once upon a time, I viewed the rants on dogs' dirt that filled the pages of provincial newspapers with disdain. "Do these people have no bigger problems to worry about? Can't they all just watch where they are going?" I wondered in blissful ignorance. Yet, after 10 years of gouging the mess out of shoes, pram wheels and bicycle tyres, I find myself not only wielding my green pen on this subject, but advocating the kind of crackdown that would, frankly, be hard to justify in the war against terrorism.
Of course, I exaggerate a tad. I don't really want to discriminate against all dogs, since the fault lies not with them, but with the (substantial) minority of owners who fail to look after them properly. But it is more than irritating that, at a time when we are being harangued about the time our children spend playing on games consoles, any attempts to introduce them to the great outdoors are often marred by animal lovers who think their dog has a right to defecate where it pleases.
At its extreme, their irresponsibility exposes children to the risk of toxoplasmosis and E coli 0157 – in 1999 a 12-year-old girl died after being infected by the bacteria while playing on a dog-fouled beach. More prosaically, it means kids are less likely to be allowed to explore rough ground and woodlands.
The frustrating thing is that there's just no excuse. Failing to clean up after your dog is not a crime born of deprivation, addiction or lack of opportunity, but of laziness and a contempt for other people.
Nor is it difficult to address. Everywhere you look there are bins for the express purpose of disposing of dog waste. Indeed, the only reason for not attending to your dog's business is that you think you're somehow too good to be shovelling shit, in which case you shouldn't be allowed to own one in the first place.
Let down by their local authorities, some desperate souls have been inspired to take their own action against offenders. Some years ago, a Parisian painter known only as Cho took to creating works of art around the messes in his arrondissement, marking each one with a flag bearing the time of its appearance and his signature. Similarly, rangers at a country park in Rhyl went through their "yellow period", when they sprayed all dog faeces the colour of the sun.
This is certainly an interesting twist on Damien Hirst's formaldehyde creations, but somewhat messy and time-consuming, I fear. And – while it draws attention to the scale of the problem – it demands a lot more of the person waging the campaign than of the culprit (who may well pass by anonymously with a smirk on his face as he realises his dog's doings have been immortalised).
Should Edinburgh's mobile CCTV initiative fail to tackle the problem in the long-term, I have a much more satisfactory act of vigilantism for repeat offenders (although you do have to invest time in identifying them first). Wait for a cold, rainy day, then take your children's dirty nappies and empty them on their doorstep. Next sit back and enjoy the thought of them spending an hour of their limited free time scraping it clean. Barbaric? Perhaps. Illegal? Almost certainly. But it may be the only way they'll learn.
The full article contains 1006 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
