Dog owners in a southern French town are having to get their pet’s DNA tested under new rules to tackle the scourge of poop-strewn pavements.
The mayor of Beziers has introduced the mandatory tests, meaning street cleaners would be able to take samples from droppings they find in the center of the town to identify dog owners.
Those responsible for failing to pick up their animals’ poo would be forced to pay a 120 euros (US$135) cleaning fee.
Photo: Reuters
“I’m outraged that some people never clean up after their animals,” Beziers Mayor Robert Menard told local radio France Bleu at the weekend. “We did a count: The town picked up 1,000 [dog turds] just in the center. That’s not right.”
“We thought that if we put police officers on the street it would have an effect, but when there’s a police officer, people clean up. It’s when there’s no one around that they don’t crouch down and do their civic duty,” he said.
Menard, who is an independent with close links to the far right, has been seeking to introduce dog DNA testing since 2016, but has had previous efforts knocked back by the state on legal grounds.
The new rules have been introduced on an experimental basis for the next two years.
Dog owners in the center of Beziers, a renowned bull-fighting town, would need to prove they have done a DNA test, with police authorized to issue 38 euro fines to anyone failing to produce an identity document.
The 120 euro cleaning up fees would not be enforced for three months, with Menard promising that there would be a soft launch.
“People who don’t clean up after their dogs couldn’t give a damn about anyone,” Menard said. “Sometimes I hear people say: ‘It’s up to municipal workers to clean up after my dog.’ They’ll see now. It’s going to cost 120 euros.”
DNA testing for dogs — usually done at the vets with a saliva sample — has been introduced in a host of cities worldwide, including Tel Aviv in Israel, Valencia in Spain and some areas of London.
Landlords in some private residential compounds in Florida and elsewhere have also introduced rules requiring residents to provide DNA samples of their animals to identify pavement foulers.
The mayor’s office in Beziers said cleaning up dog feces cost the municipality of 75,000 people about 80,000 euros per year.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home