To think it is long overdue that we brought in dog licencing

[Eurghh]

This is not a dog-bashing thread.

Dog poo is a massive issue in the UK - I agree some areas are worse than others, but i have lived in various places, holidayed all over, and it really is pretty bad pretty much everywhere. This country is already on its knees with paying for services out of the public fund, but SOMETHING has to be done about the huge number of people who let their dogs mess on the ground for the rest of us to contend with.

I think we need to bring back licences, which will pay for:

• dog wardens to regularly patrol problem areas, and issue fines
• a nightly hose down of pavements in problem areas and also all around pavements leading to schools
• cctv to identify people who don't pick up after their dogs
• dna database

All of this needs to be funded by dog licences.

YABU - the system is fine as it is
YANBU - please bring in licences for dog owners

Atttached to show a photo I took today which prompted me to write this, this quantity of poo is common round here, and I live in a naice well-to-do London borough.

I'm a dog owner and would happily pay for dog licences for my dogs but then you will always get the ones who always cause trouble (the type of people who don't bother to insure, tax or MOT their car for example) who won't bother to get a dog licence.
My ex-neighbour was exactly like this - a really snooty piece of work who would drive a Jaguar, wear designer clothes, have her hair cut and coloured regularly and have her eyebrows and nails done each week (all the while, looking down her nose on everyone else) - yet she drove drunk and smashed her car up, had it illegally "repaired" and drove without an MOT or insurance for over 6 months and she looked down her nose at our Border Collies and thought her Cockapoo was the bees knees, yet she let her dog crap all over the street, including leaving regular deposits right outside the local childminder's gates where the children are dropped off, her dog crapped in everyone's gardens (often as she watched) and on other people's driveways.
She never ONCE cleaned up after her dog and I know for a fact that if licences were brought in, she wouldn't get one.

I do hope dog licences are brought back though alongside the routine chipping, if only to keep the dogs themselves safe and to reduce dog theft and also discourage those who think getting a dog is like buying a hamster.

There are lots of by laws that mean it's already not allowed to have dogs off in lots of areas, and fouling has always been fine able

The dog poo dna testing scheme has been piloted in several areas in the uk, but hasn't caught on nationally for several reasons.

Firstly, DNA is tricky to extract from faeces. Doable, but more expensive and easily contaminated. Has a small forensic window of time to be collected, too. You also have to be able to match the DNA. The kinds of dog owners who let their dogs shit everywhere aren't going to offer their dog's DNA to a database voluntarily. Currently there's no way to mandate that or enforce it if it's flouted. The odds of being caught would always be minuscule. To make it mandatory you'd have to bring in new legislation and the cost of enforcing that would be extremely high indeed.

So; you'd have more misses than hits meaning a significant cost for the local authority who have to pay for it while the culprit is trying to be identified.

You'd also need a significant increase in the number of dog wardens to make an impact. That's expensive.

To increase the fines you'd need new legislation. The existing legislation allows a £100 fixed penalty notice up to £1000 fine if not paid within time. Driving with no insurance has a £300 fine. Dog poo is nowhere near comparable in the eyes of law makers, so the idea that fines can be set at a point which will pay for the costs of running the scheme is wishful thinking.

Good luck with that. How many millions of dogs are there in the country?

There is a pile of dog crap outside every other house walking down the street here. I live next to a school too. Once caught a young man allowing his dog to defecate outside the school and was told to fuck off.

You won’t ever win with dog owners unless they make it much harder to breed them and hence obtain them. 95% of dog owners shouldn’t own a stuffed one never mind a living one. I won’t get another after my girl pops her clogs because other dog owners just infuriate me.

About 5% of dogs are insured.
Lots of dogs don't go anywhere near the vet and come from a back room.

Microchipping has been the law since well before any dog was born, but 80% of dogs picked up as a stray don't have one.

Microchipping is also dead cheap, but still hasn't ever been successful

I’m utterly tired of it too, OP.

I’ve had to change the route I walk my daughter to school because there’s poo everywhere. Literally everywhere. I can’t let her ride her scooter while we’re walking to school because it’s just not possible to ride it without rolling through poo. It’s disgusting.

Samples can be taken during routine vet checkups and added to the microchip database.

The big difference with the present method of enforcement (such as it is) is that a warden wouldn't need to catch them in the act as they do at present. Therefore the warden can issue loads of fines on one patrol without seeing a single dog. Most councils already employ other forms of civil enforcement officers to deal with parking and littering so the extra manpower may be less than you think if this gets added to their existing duties.

Yes, not everyone would get registered - fines for non-compliance can help a bit. But if people think that the only people who don't pick up are the knuckleheads with XL bullies then they are mistaken. There are plenty of people from middle class areas whose dogs do periodically go to the vets and are microchipped who fail to pick up.

I'd gladly ban smoking and vaping, and fine people for littering, and the other things you have listed. I don't want to live in a dirty cresspit of a country. But the dog mess right now is at the forefront for me, as there is so much of it where I am. I actually never have issues with cats in my garden, but have done in previous gardens, so it's not on my mind so much. But I'd support something that stopped them shitting in people's gardens.

I have a ( second?) cousin (my mums cousin) who had a car, mot, taxed and presumably insured ( not sure, we don't see him) since he was 17 and apparently never had a licence. Didn't get caught until he was in his 60s and that was only because someone grassed. If they hadn't said anything he would probably still be driving around without one.

The money isn't there to enforce these things.

Thank you.

There is so much naivety on this thread around what is achievable and the costs of actually running an operation like this. Nobody is disagreeing that it would be great to clean up the streets, but some of the ideas on here are frankly, absolutely crackers.

Routine vet checks is laughable. What percentage of dogs do you recon have routine vet care?

I swear people have no idea of the scale of back yard breeding and lawlessness in this country

I saw our poor postie a few weeks back scraping poo from his shoe with a stick. Utterly unacceptable.

Then maybe we do that - clamp down on the breeders, and make dog - owning much harder. Because it's gotten so bad for dog shit, I need a solution!

Dog licences to pay for wardens.

A mechanism to add it to their council tax which results in action against them if unpaid ?

It was 37½p for a licence and cost more than that to administer. It should have been massively increased in price rather than scrapped.

I go out one Sunday a month litter picking with a group of volunteers. Not my litter. There’s a suggestion that’s feasible.

This is a great example of how things are enforced and the problem with things that can only be enforced by spot checks

You'll find lots of cars are taxed, mot'd because this can be picked up clearly by cameras, and police driving past your house can immediately see it.

What you'll find though is a massive percentage of drivers being uninsured, not having licences, disqualified etc. Because that can't be automatically checked

In order to have a car you have to drive it past cameras and likely store it on the road so people make it so it scans OK unless they are stopped

You don't in order to have a dog.

The thing is though that the reason it has to be witnessed is that it has to be beyond all reasonable doubt. That's because it's an offence under the Antisocial Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014. Being witnessed means that's established, and because it's an absolute offence (ignorance is not a defence) a DPN can be issued.

If you just collect samples from the street, within 12 months I guarantee someone would claim it was planted by someone with an axe to grind (doesn't matter if they can't prove it, doubt has been introduced) or that it's cross-contamination (dog weed on the poo). Completely unenforceable.

There are already rules around breeding, Lucy's law, cropping, microchipping and licences for over a certain no of puppies

This is rarely enforced

You'll find loads of "illegal" puppies on any puppy advertising site already outside of the law. I could tell you my neighbour is breeding puppies from awful parents, that are in bad conditions but unlikely to be massively illegal and I can tell you I'm from a community where people wouldn't engage in reporting

How would you enforce it? Would you rely on people reporting their own puppies as coming from somewhere dodgy?

If you don't assume they will go to the vet, or training or be kc registered how would you find out when dogs are born? It's like trying to identify child neglect cases by require people to register for NCT classes and then following up at a baby sensory class. Huge parts of the population don't access them, and people who are struggling especially dont

Anything that encourages people to stay away from vets, trainers, socialising etc will encourage an explosion in dog bites/risk to the public. There is a reason why vets tend to refuse to report banned breeds, why illegal immigrants don't get reported for going to a+e because it leads to suffering and cruelty

That's what would have to be avoided

Can you imagine the headlines, first they took our WFA and now the elderly are going to have their dogs put down as they can't afford the licence. The press would have a field day.

My dogs rarely go anywhere near a built up area, they are working dogs an live in fields but i would be more than happy if an annual licence was introduced. Too many people have dogs that they can't/won't control and can't/won't clean up after. I also think extending leads should be banned and really heavy fines introduced for for allowing dogs off leads in public places, £100 fine for not clearing up after your dog and £250 for not having your dog on a lead would be good.

My town center and seafront (and I'm assuming lots of other places) do have fines for this. We also have a park where you are fined for off lead dogs.

It's all currently possible just not enforced well

The dog licence fee would just about cover the cost of running the dog license fee admin and management. If that. I don't know where this imaginary huge profit idea is coming from. It's not going to pay for thousands of full time dog wardens to police the streets daily in addition to all the related costs. Add in the OP wanting nightly street hosing by another huge group of employees paid for by this mystical money producing license, DNA testing and a database....never going to happen. There would still be dog shit, there would still be owners buying unlicensed puppies and never registering them with any kind of vet or society. What the answer is I don't know, but we can't live in a dream world.