OPINION: When dog owners don’t pick up after their pets
We all know it’s rude to not clean up your dog’s poo, but did you know it could also pose a risk to public health?
Recently – and not for the first time – when I took my sons to play football, we had to find a stick with which to flick away the dog mess that had been deposited all over the public pitch.
Apart from the fact that it’s an offence punishable by a HK$5,000 fine for an owner not to clean up faeces or urine deposited by their dog in a public place, this got me thinking about the dangers of letting dogs do their doo-doos in our parks and streets, even if the offending articles are swiftly scooped up and thrown away.
In response to a question I posed about the relative threats of human and canine excrement on quora.com, a self-described biology professor answered, “Both are full of microbes, but those in human faeces are evolutionarily adapted to the human body, usually harmless, and in some cases even beneficial and necessary to human health. Dog faeces are more likely to contain bacteria that are poorly adapted to the human body and more likely to cause illness, not to mention that humans sometimes get some very serious worm infections from dog faeces.”
Although, there are exceptions, he said. “In such cases as a cholera epidemic and contamination of produce with human faeces (pathogenic strains of E coli), human faeces are certainly more dangerous.”
