Near Nice, a village introduces DNA recording of dogs to combat dog litter

Le Figaro Nice

Man’s best friend will now think twice before relieving himself on the streets of L’Escarène (Alpes-Maritimes). In this humid village in high Nice, home to 2,500 people, the municipality has issued a decree establishing DNA registration of canines. So it will soon be possible to know which dog the feces left on the public highway belongs to. An unusual way to go back to the owner of the animal to make him pay a fine for his wickedness.

This is because in L’Escarène dog excrement is a nuisance. “Especially in the summer, tourists point this out to me… As soon as someone has something negative to say, it’s always about fear of dogs. The scents especially! Because it’s not the sewers that stink in the city streets”comments the manager of the Spar supermarket. “Regularly in the morning I have to clean up the faeces in front of the shop myself, it’s absurd”he notes. The latter is one of those who welcome the initiative taken by the town hall. “People don’t understand. No matter how much we talk about it, put up posters, make reports or say there are CCTV cameras, it doesn’t work. It’s great to have animals, but you still have to know how to really take you of them.”he exclaims.

“Information campaigns do not work, we are reduced to resorting to large funds. Because yes, it is truly a plague we are talking about, laments Jean-Claude Vallauri, deputy for urban planning at the town hall of Escarène. And so, even though we’re a small town, we have a big problem identifying owners, which causes neighborly conflicts, sometimes violent, with people accusing each other.”

300 euros fine

The manager of “Coiff’toutous”, a dog groomer in L’Escarène, is more mixed. “I understand the approach, but I feel that it might be a bit much for a small town like ours. And then it costs money!”she explains. And to add: “I find it incriminates dogs when the subject is rather the disturbing rudeness of humans”.

Dog owners in the city (around a hundred) will soon be forced to take a DNA test at the vet. A laboratory will then be responsible for storing all the samples, which will later be compared with the manure found on public roads as part of this new hunt for incivility. Each DNA sample should cost around fifty euros for the city and 300 euros for each owner involved. At this price, they might finally deserve to show some courtesy. “It will cost the municipality between 3,000 and 5,000 euros. But above all, it will save us the 25,000 euros that excrement cleanup costs us on average every year.”declares Jean-Claude Vallauri.

An initiative that has already proven itself elsewhere

If the initiative is enough to make you smile or may seem disproportionate, it has nevertheless been adopted in several dozen municipalities in Spain and is not new in France. The mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard, established it in the historic center of his city last year. “We have done lots of prevention and education campaigns, each time we see improvements for three weeks, but then people go back to their bad habits. he told France 3 Occitanie in July 2023.

In just two months, eighteen dog owners had been fined 35 euros in Béziers for walking around the city center without their “DNA passport”. The dog droppings were then analyzed to find those who had not picked them up. “There is still faeces, we won’t hide it, but we are sometimes less than half, a third of what the services used to collect. This means that this experiment is effective. But it was clear. We have never doubted it,” had again entrusted the councilor, satisfied, on November 20 to the microphone of France’s Bleu Hérault. “At the end of the day, this measure is a bit of an allegory of our society, individualism, contempt for others”concludes Jean-Claude Vallauri a little disillusioned.