Thirty years ago, the City of New York passed the Canine Waste Law in an effort to clean up the “littered” sidewalks.
At the time, the New York dog population was estimated to be 500,000, although the exact number is elusive because many people do not buy the required licenses for their pets. Complaints about dog feces on city sidewalks were common.
As then-Mayor Ed Koch noted, “If you’ve ever stepped in dog doo, you know how important it is to enforce the canine waste law.”
The law stated that, “A person who owns, possesses or controls a dog, cat or other animal shall not permit the animal to commit a nuisance on a sidewalk of any public place.”
The law’s effectiveness is debated, as the amount of feces on sidewalks is difficult to quantify, but most New Yorkers agree that the situation improved.
The city’s Sanitation Department has seen variance in related complaints since the law’s inception. In 1997, the department estimated that 60 percent of residents abided by the law, roughly the same as in 1978, but with twice as many pets roaming the streets.
An article written less than 10 years later by the authors of “Freakonomics” presented a different picture: “the city is plainly cleaner, poop-wise, than it was.” Difficulty in enforcing the law is unquestionable. The authors think many conform to the law because of social mores, not because of the law’s enforcement, which is rare.
The law has been imitated nationally and internationally, in cities such as New Haven, Conn., and Berlin, Germany.