Laurence Dollimore
A SPANISH municipality has announced it will collect canine DNA from dog poo to catch owners who don’t pick up after their furry friends.
Officials in Mislata, near Valencia, said police will begin taking samples of dog excrement collected by street cleaners to a local lab for analysis.
Owners have until December 31 to take their dogs to a vet so that a blood sample can be taken free of charge.
Those who fail to register their dog’s DNA will face fines of €300.
If they fail to remove their dog’s mess from the pavement, they have been warned that they face a €200 fine.
After a dog is registered on the DNA database, the owner will get a name tag that must be worn by the dog at all times.
Great idea, Sabinillas and Manilva should do this! The streets here are a disgrace.
Bet those crap-collecting cops will love their new duty. First of all they’ll need a database of every dog’s DNA in the area. Expensive, The fines will need to reflect that and the cost of the cop’s poosticks and sample bags and the forensic analysis.
This thing could run and run….
& Ever worse if it’s runny – lol …….. but seriously, Mijas council has already been doing this (for a while now) and it has had a tremendous result with the streets being much cleaner.
About time. I would charge all dog owners a 100euro registration fee for a dog licence, then when they buy a dog, that it will be compulsory to take it to obedience classes, and has passed this to an acceptable level. All dogs to be spot checked that they are legally registered and owners fined heavily if not.
Too many dogs are owned by irresponsible people, and dog ownership needs tightened up all over the world. As a runner and cyclist who has been attacked, bitten, and harassed by dogs, it can’t come quick enough
Ray – you mean they have exterminated all the those poor dogs abandoned by the Spanish. My male dog was abandoned as a 3 month old pup and the female dog followed us home from a cortijo – she had over 250 ticks with blood sacs, how she survived I don’t know. The sub-human who ‘owned’ her knew where I lived but he never came to claim his dog back as he knew his next move would be into a body bag, unless I had chopped his body up to feed all the abandoned dogs.
Suart: Let me say that you are a good man.
Returning to the article:
Ít is a pity that the vandalic comportament of so many dog owners make that this measure of CSI for dogs excrements will be as necessary,and I hope that It will aplied in all the spanish towns,beaches included.
It´s amazing to find that in some railways it is beginning to be allowed the presence of dogs. The problem are not the dogs else the animal of two legs that actually are many owners.
Stuart….. the stray dog problem is something else entirely …….. no, Mijas has a policy in place where if someone is allowing a (pet) dog to continually foul the pavements, then the DNA is checked and the offending owner receives a fine of (i beleive) €600 ……. it has certainly had an effect on the bad owners, but the good owners have no problem and openly support this.
Now, charging people €100 is ridiculous and would only make the stray problem worse as those who couldn’t afford to pay would have no option but to abandon the poor animal. The Spanish law however should be amended to make spaying (or castration) necessary to do and maybe less expensive & then, after a few years, the stray-problem will sort itself out. There are far to many dogs in the shelters, and something ‘legally’ needs to be done to stop this problem, as the current laws certainly dont work.
As an archaeologist, I love visiting Merida in Extremadura, yet I spend much of my time looking down at the sidewalk in order to avoid, “Slip, Sliding Away”! Merida stinks! (literally not metaphorically).