Sun, 21 March 2010
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Are forensic dog-poop units the answer to cities' waste management problems? One lawmaker in eastern Germany certainly hopes so.DNA testing has been used for everything from murder cases to paternity suits to researching family heritage. Now city councils around the world, from Germany to Israel, are becoming increasingly interested in using the method to solve an entirely different problem: tracking down dog owners who do not clean up after their pups.
Earlier this week, German lawmaker Peter Stein became the latest politician to call for DNA testing of dog poop in order to identify the canine culprit and fine owners for not picking up after their pooch.
Stein, a conservative Christian Democratic state parliamentarian in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said that under his proposal, officials would test the feces and then match it up with the offending dog using a DNA database of all canines.
Currently, German dog owners are fined 30 to 40 euros (40 to 50 dollars) if they fail to clean up after their pets but very few people are ever caught. Only four fines were given out in Stein's hometown of Rostock last year, Stein told AFP. The city has 200,000 residents and 6,500 registered dogs.
"Just saying 'it wasn't my dog' will not wash any more," Stein said. 
Each DNA test, according to Bild newspaper, would cost about 75 euros. However, adding each pooch to the DNA database would run another 200 euros. “The cost will naturally fall to the dog owners,” Stein said.
The sky is the limit
The idea of performing DNA tests on dog poop has been floating around for a while. In a 2005 New York Times article, the authors of the best-selling book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, proposed DNA testing to deal with the feces produced by New York City's dog population, which numbers about one million.
I would like to suggest people to please stop pointing fingers and just clean the dog's poop... be a responsible dog owner and it will help save our planet.. let's keep in mind what happened in the Philippines a month ago... mother earth is showing us how much damage we've done.. and please use a flushable dog poop bag.. that you can just flush down the toilet without clogging it and it will degrade naturally just like our own poop... we have to stop using plastics for our dog poops and just putting it in trash cans.. dog poops will not biodegrade in landfills.. please, please, please... let's start with our dogs so others will see and follow... :)
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