by fedupwithdogowners » Mon Jan 20, 2025 12:29 pm
Everywhere I go around Northcote area these days, the streets are a minefield of dog sh*t. It's on the pavement, by the side of the road, on the common. It's everywhere. Yesterday my son managed to step in two separate piles while out trying to ride his bike. On Honeywell Road, as the kids walk to school each morning, they have to dodge whatever that morning's dog owners have left behind, usually with very limited success. I've never known the problem to be so bad, and I grew up in this area, before poo bags and dog bins were normal.
Most of us live here because we have, or have had, young children. We know how unsanitary this is, and how potentially bad for kids' health, let alone being absolutely disgusting. Why is this such a huge problem? I saw a statistic saying that there are 40 percent more dogs in the UK now than there were ten years ago, which would explain the increase in dogs, but not in owners who are too lazy or too selfish or too fancy to pick up after their pets.
I wanted to write this here because I don't know what else to do. I've written to the council and nothing happened. Do we need a public-awareness campaign? A DNA testing database (far too expensive to be realistic given the current state of the country's finances). Could we all just agree that we don't have to live like this, with sh*t all over our streets and shared spaces? It really says something for how little people seem to care about their communities these days that they refuse to do the most simple thing in terms of cleaning up their own messes. And yet I know from my own neighbours that most people do care. So why has the problem become this bad?
Everywhere I go around Northcote area these days, the streets are a minefield of dog sh*t. It's on the pavement, by the side of the road, on the common. It's everywhere. Yesterday my son managed to step in two separate piles while out trying to ride his bike. On Honeywell Road, as the kids walk to school each morning, they have to dodge whatever that morning's dog owners have left behind, usually with very limited success. I've never known the problem to be so bad, and I grew up in this area, before poo bags and dog bins were normal.
Most of us live here because we have, or have had, young children. We know how unsanitary this is, and how potentially bad for kids' health, let alone being absolutely disgusting. Why is this such a huge problem? I saw a statistic saying that there are 40 percent more dogs in the UK now than there were ten years ago, which would explain the increase in dogs, but not in owners who are too lazy or too selfish or too fancy to pick up after their pets.
I wanted to write this here because I don't know what else to do. I've written to the council and nothing happened. Do we need a public-awareness campaign? A DNA testing database (far too expensive to be realistic given the current state of the country's finances). Could we all just agree that we don't have to live like this, with sh*t all over our streets and shared spaces? It really says something for how little people seem to care about their communities these days that they refuse to do the most simple thing in terms of cleaning up their own messes. And yet I know from my own neighbours that most people do care. So why has the problem become this bad?
