Jenna Price | Are dog passports the answer for dog-poo littered streets and walkways?

She picks up the poo and disposes of it.

Which makes me wonder why people who have excellent sight think it's perfectly OK to leave their canine's droppings all over the place.

I write this now because I am totally envious of those who live in the southern French town of Béziers. The local mayor Robert Ménard has responded to complaints about dog poo on footpaths and is taking action. I live for the day someone around here takes action.

Ménard is planning to tag dags. In other words, he is about to introduce a scheme where dogs, under the care of their owners, will have to provide a free saliva sample. That will be genetically tested and the results will be scanned into a dog passport. Beware the dog owner travelling with dog but without passport. Fines apply!

And that all happens before you even skive off from cleaning up after your pooping pooch. In the event of an unattended poo, a specimen will be collected, sent off to the poo register and matched with the dog and its owner. Then the owner will be billed for street cleaning, about 200 bucks.

I'm not entirely sure who gets to do the specimen collecting but I'm pretty sure the police won't be on poop patrol. Maybe it will be left to concerned citizens. Maybe everyone will be issued with little crap containers for on-the-spot collection. And dobbing.

Look, it sounds utterly mad but I'm here for it.

During the depths of COVID, Australians went crazy for dogs. According to Animal Medicines Australia, there has been a huge boom in pet ownership since 2019 when it did its last survey, from 61 per cent to 69 per cent and that's been led by a surge in dog ownership.

I didn't need a survey to tell me that. When I survey the footpaths and tree roots of Australia, the evidence is before me. We have an estimated 31 million pets nationally, about half of those pets are dogs and my goodness, they poo a lot.

How do I know? Am I taking a poo census? No - but check your surrounds. Someone will have packed the poo into a plastic bag and then not bothered to dispose of it appropriately. Instead, those poo parcels will be adorning fences, tree branches, footpaths. Or they sit atop rubbish bins because the enablers (read, owners) seem to think it is beneath them to actually drop the plop.

So first we have the hideous poo problem and then we have poo packed in plastic. Poo packets. This is a lose-lose situation.

The British Forestry Commission recommends what it calls "stick and flick". Impale the poo. Flick it into the bushes. Use hand sanitiser afterwards (OK, this was my addition). Some clever person in its PR department even penned poetry to prevent poo proliferation:

"If your dog should do a plop,

Take a while and make a stop.

Just find a stick and flick it wide

Into the undergrowth at the side."

I'm not sure I love this but it's a cure for the idea that somehow wrapping your doggy do in something which breaks down super slowly, "biodegradable" plastic, will somehow improve the environmental impact of dog excreta.

Honestly though, it's tough to take this on. If you criticise dogs, apparently you are a bad person. Those who don't want giant slavering beings (or even bristly yapping more compact canines) bounding up to tiny toddlers (or even short women) are evil and unfeeling. This is the extent of our dog daze - no understanding that we are meant to live harmoniously, as a society, considering the needs of others. Just as I would care for my grandchildren well enough to ensure they don't put their filthy paws all over your clothes or knock you over at a running pace, the same rules should apply to dog owners. Unless you are a parent or grandparent, you have probably not had a small child come up and lick you or wipe their hands on you. Yet there is absolutely no question that this happens to people who don't own dogs but who are forced to interact with them against their will.

The average dog excretes 340 grams a day. Say there are 15 million dogs. You do the math. That's five million kilos of poo a day. That's an environmental disaster right there. And sure, there are plenty of humans who do the right thing and clean up after their dogs. There are also plenty who don't.

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I kind of wish strength to the arm of anyone trying for a solution, although this bloke's been elected on a far-right ticket and that never ends well. He first tried his scheme out in 2016 but it failed because the local administrative court interpreted it as an attack on personal freedom. I get that - but surely the rest of us should be free to roam the streets without getting shit on our shoes.

And yes, it's true that media make a fuss about this - but nobody likes it. And no-one seems to have come up with a solution which accommodates both indulgent dog owners and cranky people such as myself who do not wish to have fly-attracting, disease-disseminating canine excrement everywhere.

But there are solutions, according to the French Association for Information and Studies on Companion Animals. Local authorities need to have a plan which includes suitable regulations as well as a really excellent way (sustainable, sanitary) of dealing with the poo itself.

And in the same way those of us responsible for children know there are things you can and can't allow them to get away with, that might be a really useful lesson for dog owners. Because it's not really the dogs that are the problem, it's the people who own them.