DNA of pet dogs to be used to trace mess on streets in village near Nice

A town in Alpes-Maritimes is introducing DNA tests to identify dogs that leave their mess on the pavement. The costly measure could help the commune cut its massive €25,000 a year bill for cleaning dog dirt whilst deterring offending dog owners.

The commune of L’Escarène, near Nice (Alpes-Maritimes), issued the decree in October for all local dog owners to get a ‘genetic passport’ for their dog. Tourists with dogs are not impacted. 

The town has long struggled with the problem of dog dirt on its pavements.

“It is always in the same areas,” local official Françoise Isoart told BFM TV. “Instead of walking and looking around, we have to look down to see if there is anything unpleasant’.

The problem has become so bad that the town is known locally as “la boîte à caca” ('the poo box'), Ms Isoart added.

“Especially in the summer, I hear about it from tourists,” the manager of the local Spar told Le Figaro, “Whenever someone has something negative to say, it's always the dog poo.”

Genetic passports and new fines

According to the decree, local dog owners must visit a vet and have a genetic passport made or face a €38 fine.

“We will pay for the test if it is done by the local vet, and we will also pay for the laboratory analysis of the sample,” said local official Jean-Claude Vallauri. 

“So it won't cost the owner anything, but for the local authority it's around €50 per animal.”

Dog mess will then be collected, its DNA extracted and compared with the town’s dog passport records. 

The culpable owners will then face fines of €300.

“The scheme should cost the local authority between €3,000 and €5,000. But above all, it will save us the €25,000 it costs us on average each year to clean up the droppings,” said Mr Vallauri.

“Our awareness campaigns didn’t work, so we’ve been forced to use the big guns. This is a scourge,” he said.

“Even though we're a small community, we have a major problem identifying the owners, which leads to neighbourhood disputes, sometimes violent ones, with people accusing each other”

 The scheme L’Escarène follows a similar - albeit much larger one - introduced in Béziers (Hérault) in September 2023.

Under the scheme in Béziers, which costs around €80,000 a year, around 1,000 droppings a month are collected from the town centre and taken for genetic sampling. 

The dog owners there face fines of €122.

“There are still some droppings, we won't deny it,” Béziers official Jean-Claude Vallauri told France Bleu. “But we're down to less than half, sometimes a third, of what the services used to collect. This means that this experiment is effective. But we never doubted it.”