LAW AND ODOR

The early weeks of spring arrive with their cherished events: Crocuses lift through the thawing earth on the sunny sides of buildings, children begin searching for the baseball gloves they left somewhere – under the bed, maybe – and the Bangor Daily News appeals to scofflaws of Bangor’s pooper-scooper ordinance to make a clean break from their habit.

A whiff of spring has brought city residents to their local parks, where a whiff of the parks may send them home. The winter litter boxes for the canine have thawed again, and the word should go forth, again, to remind dog owners that other residents don’t want and shouldn’t have to encounter their pets’ excrement.

This is a safety and sanitation issue, and a losing one if it is merely seen as an enforcement question. Few people want police to spend their time waiting to hand a ticket to a scofflaw dog owner caught in the act of not cleaning up. But unless the city – its officials and its citizens – acts as if the habits of some owners are unacceptable, the spring mess will be a permanent feature of the city’s parks and sidewalks and on its increasingly popular city forest trails.

Bangor passed a pooper-scooper ordinance in 1984, and it has helped; it’s now common to see responsible pet owners cleaning up after their dogs, a very encouraging sign and evidence that this problem can be solved. But there are also those who did not care about much but the relief of their darling Fifi. The result: workers removing hundreds of piles of poop from Merchant’s Plaza and vendors at Bangor’s artisan market wielding shovels before they can set up their wares.

Perhaps all that can be done is to appeal to the better natures of dog owners, to ask them to consider, of all the uses of the city’s parks, how their action – or inaction – fits into kids playing ball, families having picnics or folks enjoying an evening stroll.

A demand for owners to clean up is not anti-dog. It is a sincere effort to deal with an aesthetic problem that has serious potential health consequences. The parks around the city these days are evidence that too many dog owners still don’t care.