The dog poop situation in France totally stinks.
I was optimistic about 25 years ago when Paris put on an offensive against shit-smeared sidewalks. Fines, cajoling and something called a Motocrotte (a motorcycle ridden by a city pooper scooper who picks up what is known in French as crotte), did a decent job reducing the obscene amount of canine excrement that had smeared sidewalks and streets.
None of it was good enough, especially for a country that is so environmentally conscious. Even with a healthy number of discourteous dog owners in the US, France still seems to have way more un-scooped poop than America. And Rennes is holding up its end, as it were.
Making my way back from the supermarket this morning I counted the poop – in various states of smear – along my route. To make this a relevant assessment, I counted only the feces that laid directly in my path. Ten poops. During a one-mile walk, I had to step over or swerve my caddie 10 times to avoid landing in dog shit.
Not all of what I see are steaming piles of crap. When you are forced to become a defecation detective, you quickly learn the various stages of dog feces.
First there’s what I call, Look, Fresh Scat! Much like survivalists on “Alone,” I am tracking the whereabouts of the city’s wildlife by noting the freshness of its excrement. This type still glistens with moisture. Give it a wide berth.
Next would be the Oh, Merde! This is poop that has recently been stepped on by just one person. The footprint could have been made by the pointy Italian shoes of a thin smoker rushing to work in his skinny navy suit. I don’t know for sure. I need to hone my footprint identification skills a bit more. That initial footprint is followed by its offspring. Like ducklings running from their mother, each subsequent print gets smaller and smaller.
Finally, there is The Smudge. This may be one of the businessman’s duckling footprints, a random splotch from a small dog, or the spot where an unfortunate victim scraped her shoe. The key with The Smudge is becoming proficient enough to distinguish it from its doppelgangers: The Disintegrating Brown Leaf and The Innocent But Often-Maligned Hunk of Mud.
I’ve been fascinated and outraged enough by all this to spend a shitload of time researching the issue. I learned about all the health risks. I researched France’s efforts to get the capital’s dog owners to cooperate. I got a chuckle out of one French town’s efforts to catch the poopers by requiring DNA samples of all the village pups. I even waded deep into a study on “Public Hygiene and the Management of Dog Mess in Paris since the 1920s.”
It was a lot to digest, but along the way I stumbled across a few theories on why the French are so reluctant to scoop. One suggests that the problem lies in the perfect storm: a lack of poop-bag stations, the cost of commercial poop bags and the elimination of plastic shopping bags. Another posits that the French believe their taxes ought to pay for the government to pick up after their dogs. One writer went a step further, suggesting – tongue firmly planted in cheek – that refusing to pick up after your dog preserves French jobs. That excuse failed the smell test when the Motocrotte and its driver, the Motocrotteur (honest to God, that’s what they called him) only eliminated 20 percent of Paris’ crotte. Eventually, that effort was flushed. (Sorry about that last one there.)
I also, as the conspiracy theorists like to say, “did my own research.” I’ve been studying – and by studying I mean, glaring at – French dog owners in an effort to tease out the reasons why they won’t do the right thing.
I acknowledge that picking up shit is gross. Who wouldn’t want to leave it there and slink away unsullied? I actually know someone in the US who takes her dog for a walk with a rock wrapped in a poop bag, so she can feign picking up the poop without actually having to touch it. But, come on! We all wipe ourselves. This is no excuse.
It’s also possible that dog owners aren’t the only ones to blame here. (I will say this only once, so listen up: It is quite apparent – and do not ask me how I know because I won’t go into it – that not all the poop comes from dogs. There. I said it. Now let’s move on.)
I think I finally have discovered, if not the root of the problem, at least a huge contributing factor: Hardly anybody keeps their dog on a leash.
Despite the fact that French health regulations require that dogs must be leashed on public roads in urban areas, no one pays any attention to that rule. There’s a part of the French attitude about dog ownership that feels like a holdover from rural France: A dog is less a pet and more a farm animal. Although the police seem rabid about stopping bicyclists without safety vests or lights, I’ve never seen one sidle up to an unleashed dog. Consequently, dogs and their owners are often separated by distances ranging from a couple feet to several hundred yards.
Who’s to say which dog just squatted on the sidewalk? Who would know? Maybe the dog owner doesn’t even know. Most likely, though, he knows full well but has just succeeded in creating plausible deniability.
This cannot stand, I tell you! Someone must pay!
On that point, let me make myself very clear: The penalty should not be paid by the pooch. This is not the dog’s fault. Dogs are blameless and, quite frankly, earth-bound angels. Who’s a good boy, am I right?
It’s the inconsiderate, lazy owners who are at fault. Because French dog owners cannot be shamed (we’ve seen that with all my fruitless glaring, I mean research), the only option is to levy a fine. A big, stinking fine.
Is it possible that the ubiquity of bidets does in fact make French people (not to mention Italians) resistant to dealing with poop, um, by hand? Just asking.
At least you don’t have a dog who’s constantly trying to eat other dogs’ poop. I’d never have otherwise realized just how many people don’t bother to scoop from the grass. But what really puzzles me are the ones who leave full poop bags on the sidewalk and just move on. I suspect that even the French wouldn’t do that.