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Sunday, July 27, 2008

Thirtieth Anniversary of the "Pooper Scooper" Law.

The great battles fought over the advance of civilization should not be forgotten...
WHEN S#@* HAPPENED

On this, the 30th anniversary birthday of our famous "poop scoop" law, the first of its kind to work in a big city and model for communities around the world, what are we celebrating -- besides the fact that we don't have to scrape something off our shoes?...

It was New York's decline in the early 1970s that allowed the poop-scoop law to pass in the first place. More people owned dogs for protection, and strays ran through the boroughs. Alan Beck, the head of the Bureau of Animal Affairs, estimated that by 1975, there were 300,000 to 500,000 pounds of dog crap left on city pavements daily.

Had the city been, er, flush, it could have hired more sanitation workers to handle the problem. But New York was in the midst of a fiscal crisis, basic services were being scaled back, and street cleaners refused to do more dirty work.

When eyes turned to the owners, author Cleveland Amory and other animal rights advocates, along with humane organizations and shelters, united against a "pick it up yourself" proposal they considered harsh and unfair. In the long run, they predicted, the law would force people to abandon their loved ones, and would lead to an eventual ban on dogs...

"Like the Jews of Nazi Germany," said the head of New York's Dog Owners Guild with typical understatement, "we citizens, including the old and the infirm, are being humiliated by being forced to pick up excrement from the gutter."

A raucous hearing in 1972 led to a stalemate and citizens started taking matters into their own hands. Town meetings degenerated into shouting matches and the stuff didn't just hit the fan -- it was thrown at people.

On the pavement, walking a dog could be stressful and even violent. The simple pleasures of canine companionship were spoiled as paranoid pet owners looked over their shoulders for vigilantes...

It took several years of bad community relations, and a no-nonsense mayor like Ed Koch, who went to the state level for support, before the fighting ended. But even in Albany there was strong resistance to the scoop ... The main concern was that similar laws had already been tried and failed in other places, and those opposed feared that yet another unenforceable decree would only encourage more disrespect for authority in general.

The irony is that they were right, at least about the unenforceable part. Health Law 1310, which eventually passed in August 1978, was tough to police and erratically used. It succeeded not because of fines (of which there weren't huge numbers), but because the debate forced dog owners to take action.

Slowly but surely, owners learned that picking up wasn't so bad. They started to believe that lending a helping hand would get New York back on its feet. The vast majority of dogs owners continue to comply, not because they have to -- they never really did -- but because they want to. Cleaning up a dog's mess had become, as Parks Commissioner Henry Stern rejoiced, "a respectable and honorable act."....

If there are downsides to 1310, it's when legislators take the precedent too far. In the case of the poop-scoop law itself, there are calls to increase the fines -- proposed by of all people Sen. Frank Pavadan, who opposed the original legislation -- and for video surveillance of dog walkers in Brooklyn and the Bronx... [NY Post].
But we'll fight those battles later. Today, our shoes are clean.