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.

We used to have dog licences, I remember going to the post office to pay for it it was abolished in 1987 as it was to expensive to administer and replaced by other legislation around dog control orders, which are now used for dogs on leads and dogs excluded notices, and no doubt dog fouling

Its highly unlikely it will come back. How will be be administered? How much would that cost? Millions. So any dog licence fee will be used to pay for administration rather than anything else, and you can bet your bottom dollar the majority won’t but one, then you spend millions chasing them

we need Ai surveillance systems that use facial recognition that's linked to a database so when dog owners dont pick up the mess then they can be auto fined for it

There’s just too many dogs; what’s needed is a cull.

hardly, more like better owners

Exactly this. 👆
Not only is OP BU, she's also naive in the extreme.

I live in a place which has dog licenses and have also got caught not having a license. I got caught because they do random spot checks. They knock on the door and of course most dogs bark when someone knocks on their door so they hear barking and oh, no dogs registered at this address. Had to pay the fee plus a late fee and submit all paperwork by 7pm that day or face a 5K fine or something ridiculous. Just in case anyone was wondering how licensing systems work. It doesn’t pay for anything in the OP though, it just makes sure that the population is vaccinated, certain breeds are charged more to discourage people from owning them and dog s which are not neutered/spayed also cost more.

You can’t make people be better, though. Our local park is divided in half with really clear signs that one half is dogs on leads only, or pay a fine – gets completely ignored. People let their dog in the children’s playground and do an innocent “Oh, do you mind? I suppose I could tie him outside if you really can’t bear it…” as if we’re the weird ones, despite new signage forbidding it (the most our council will do is loads of signs, heaven forfend they enforce it). There’s dog poo EVERYWHERE particularly on the streets to the school run and in the back paths of the park (fewer witnesses to shame them into picking up).

You can reduce the number of dogs available for the lazy bad owners to access.

but then you would get some that see the shortage and illegal breed other dogs to sell to those people so the end result is no different

I'm sure all these employees will be thrilled to add scraping up random bits of dog shit to their job roles 😂 Who is funding the DNA testing process for all these random evidence turds? Do you have any idea of how much that would cost and the failure rate? What are you testing them against as no database is currently established. How many case of testing fox and cat poo do you think would happen? It would be like throwing money into the dog shit bins that people fail to use. No amount of succesful fines would cover any of this.

I forgot. In Switzerland chf5 million mandatory liability insurance to own a dog. This bit isn’t policed, but it easily could be.
Most people have liability and legal insurance here anyway, because it makes sense.

During the first 15 minutes of walking my dog today I counted 32 pieces of litter, 2 vapes, broken glass from a vodka bottle and a car number plate. I also saw one dog turd on the pavement and one used poo bag hanging from a tree.
Humans are the problem with all of these but dog waste is a lesser problem than general litter.

On my monthly litter picks it takes roughly 30 minutes to fill one bin liner. I do 2 hours along with at least 4 others. There’s never nothing to collect. Dog’s mess isn’t on the same scale at all.

@Onleemoi
Thank you for litter picking. Our local Wombles pick up dozens of bags every week and now we’ve recently lost 25% of all bins there will probably be more.
I don’t litter pick but I never litter and taught dc not to.
I don’t understand the mentality of littering whether it be dog turds or general litter.

OP is suggesting dog wardens paid for by the licence fee.