As winter wears off, messes left behind by man’s best friend re-emerge. The culprit: dog owners covering up their pooch’s waste in the snow.
“I guess some people think they can get away with not cleaning it up, but when that snow melts – there is going to be poop everywhere,” said Josh, a dog owner.
But perhaps there is a solution.
A pet waste management company aptly named Pooprints offers DNA tests on dog waste. The company has managed five Chicagoland areas out of more than 900 communities nationwide within the past two years.
“We rarely have re-offenders. Rarely,” Pooprints owner Mike Stone said, boasting a 90 percent success rate for Pooprints. “So the program really does work. The dog waste problem goes away.”
How does it work? The company teams up with condo communities, swabs the inside of the dog’s cheek and registers them in a DNA database.
After a dog’s mess is discovered, a sample of it is collected in viles by the company’s maintenance workers to track down the “poop-a-trators.” The sample is then sent to Pooprints’ lab where DNA is taken and matched with dogs in a community database.
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Tests cost about $60, but it is the dog owner guilty of leaving waste behind who pays for it. Dog owners whose mutts are caught during DNA testing are fined by condo associations, ranging from $250 to an eviction.
Several luxury condo buildings downtown and a 600-unit condo complex in Glendale Heights have already begun using Pooprints’ services.
“At first I kind of questioned it, but then I was like, ‘Well people need to clean up after themselves and if it’s the only way to do it – then you gotta do it,” said Jordan Keller, a dog owner whose luxury condo association had her dog registered in Pooprints’ program.
Chicagoan Linda Rosenthal thinks that Maggie Daley Park should use the program.
“You’ve got probably 7,500 dogs in this area and this is the park,” Rosenthal said. “And I think that everybody would say, ‘OK, we will do the DNA. If my dog does something and I don’t cover it up, it’s my responsibility. I’m willing to pay for it.”
The idea may not be so “far-fetched” after all now that several cities throughout the country are looking into it.
“Carmel, Indiana is considering it in their new dog parks,” Stone said. “They see how this will work – it won’t cost them. It will cost the residents. As far as the fines, that will be some revenue for the cities – just a win-win situation for any municipality.”
