UK town considers hiring dog poo "investigator"

poodle

The lucky candidate will be paid about $50 an hour—not bad for government work—but literally endure a shit job.

The Cheddar Valley Gazette's Charlotte Fay-Fineran investigates a bucolic English town buried in bucolic English dog poo.

Axbridge in Somerset is pondering calling upon a dog poop private snoop after two decades of fighting a losing battle against a constant plague of dog mess.

"For the last 20 years of my life, we have been talking about dog fouling," said councillor Pauline Ham at Monday night's council meeting.

"Discussing it isn't going to make it go away, all the schemes in the world and bins aren't going to make it go away.

"So, the proposal to the council is that we inform Axbridge residents that our intentions are to employ a private investigator."

Another popular poo-fighting scheme in Britain is to have someone go around painting the poo bright colors, thereby shaming locals into cleaning it up (and, presumably, being more mindful of its deposition in the first place)

The London Borough of Camden has a new weapon in its eternal fight against dog poo: pink spray paint. The idea is to embarrass dog owners who fail to pick up after their animals—and they've offered cans of paint to local residents who wish to participate in the program.

The mess will not be subsequently cleaned up, officials say, to ensure that the highlighted excrement remains as much a public eyesore as possible.

The poo inspectors of Great Britain don't have a particularly good record, unfortunately: the prior link is worth clicking, as it leads to phrases such as "where is this phantom poo?", "non-compliance of female" and "there isn't even a poo, is there?"

If the new plan fails, perhaps they could just collect it and use it to power a bus.