Dog owners in Béziers will have their family pets’ saliva tested so excrement can be connected to particular animals
Mon 17 Jul 2023 15.25 BST
Dog owners in the southern French town of Béziers are to be needed to bring their family pet’s “genetic passport” in a trial plan to decrease dog excrement on the streets.
Local mayor Robert Ménard, a previous reporter and co-founder of Reporters Sans Frontières, says occupants and visitors are fed up with faeces on the town’s pavements. He prepares to present a two-year experiment to trace and fine those who stop working to clean up after their family pets.
“We have to punish to make people behave better,” Ménard, elected on a far-right ticket in 2014 and reelected in 2020, informed France Bleu radio.
Under the prepared plan, dog owners will be needed to take their family pets to a veterinarian or ask among the town’s veterinary professionals for a complimentary saliva sample, which will be genetically evaluated and a file released. Those consequently stopped without their dog’s hereditary passport will be fined €38 (£32.60).
Dog excrement discovered on the pavement will be gathered and evaluated and the information sent to cops who will seek advice from the nationwide family pet signs up and match it to a particular owner who will deal with an expense for street tidying up to €122, Ménard said.
Ménard initially proposed gathering DNA from the approximated 1,500 dogs in the centre of Béziers in 2016 however his demand was declined by the regional administrative court as an attack on personal flexibility. The plan was then approximated to cost €50,000 a year.
He said the brand-new hereditary passport procedure was sent to the regional prefecture previously this year and no objections to its application were raised this time.
Ménard informed French radio: “I can’t take any more of this [dog] mess. The state has said nothing against this scheme this time and thinks the same thing. This has to be done and not just in Béziers … We need to penalise people so that they behave properly.
“We did a count and we pick up more than 1,000 messes a month, sometimes a lot more, just in the town centre. It just cannot go on.”
He said the experiment would run till July 2025.
Ménard included: “There will be a certain lenience for those who are not from Béziers. If they pick up their dog dirt we won’t bother them. We’re not xenophobes. Foreigners aren’t the problem, it’s the locals who are not cleaning up.”
In 2015 it was reported in the UK that Flintshire county council near Liverpool was thinking about utilizing a DNA database to secure down on dog mess, while the Isle of Wight and Hyndburn in Lancashire have actually likewise gone over utilizing hereditary screening.
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