Drives me absolutely bonkers!

Here in Geneva the pavements are minefields of dog poop and streaked with lines of pish. People aren't allowed urinate on the street, why should dogs be?

And people who don't clean up after their dogs in parks and green spaces should be shot! Kids play there! Honestly, what kind of as*hole does that?!

I propose a heavy tax on dog owners to pay for proper street cleaning and, needless to say, a reintroduction of the stocks in Place Neuve for people who don't clean up after their dogs.

I guess you've never been to Marseille...

Hmmm... what part of Geneva do you live in? I live in Champel and find, for the most part, people pick-up after their dogs. Even in Parc Bertrand, I've never had a problem with stepping in dog poop.

In the late sixteenth century, the popularity of the Great Norfolk Mingehound became such that the streets of London were positively ripe with their voluminous defecatory products. Entire alleyways and streets became inaccessible as these foul, maggotty creatures, let off the leash for the purposes of exercise and urban scrote hunting, filled them with pile upon pile of steaming, flyblown excrement, that reached as high as the windows of the second floor in some cases, preventing people from leaving their houses without the use of improvised sledges and skis.

The situation had become so bad by the summer of 1604 that the newly enthroned King James took a break from burning papists to offer a reward to the man who could rid the streets of London of this terrible turdular tribulation before the entire city became submerged (submerded?) forever.

Several impractical solutions were submitted, resulting in several beheadings and bonfires, until, just as the king was beginning to despair of ever ridding his kingdom of the ocean of ordure, my Uncle Bertrand knocked on the door of Greenwich Palace, with an idea that would change the shape of the world forever.

My Uncle proposed that he would employ several thousand unemployed Huguenots to shovel the **** onto barrows, which would be dragged by teams of convicted papists to the Thames, where it would be loaded upon a series of barges seized from the Spaniards specially for the purpose. My Uncle had only got this far with the plan, but it all seemed like a pretty good idea all the same, and King James commissioned him for the task, promising that all goods and personnel would be provided by the state, and that the rewards would be really rather super.

And so the work began. From late June until the end of December, hundreds of thousands of labourers shovelled and dragged and loaded and sweated and fainted and puked, until all the coprolicious crap of the capital had been removed and put on the barges, ready to be taken somewhere else. Like Spain, for example. Or France.

Finally, at the end of February, 1605, my Uncle Bertrand set sail with his foetid, flyblown fleet, with the hope of reaching the shores of some Romish enemy or other by the end of the month.

Alas, he had not bargained for a powerful winter storm which arose from nowhere, blasting the entire fleet right down the Atlantic, past the Cape of Good Hope, and deep into waters unknown, far, far away from anywhere my Uncle had gone before, even accounting for his travels with Marco Polo a few years before.

Eventually, the fleet came to a standstill somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere: Where, exactly, nobody could tell.

The crews of the barges were running low on water, had run out of weevilly biscuits, and were beginning to look longingly at the piles of nutritious nastiness that were lying in great quantities all over the ships, beginning to look, to the delirious eyes of the famished sailors, like the most delicious sweetmeats ever created: Gourmet fudge, perhaps, or chocolate mousse.

My Uncle, fully aware (long before the invention of science) of the dangers of coprophagy, realised that Something Had to be Done.

And so, ignoring the protests of a starving and ever-more-mutinous crew, my Uncle commanded that the pernicious cargo be cast overboard!

The ocean is deep, and many ships and treasures have been lost to the world forever in Poseidon's hungry depths, but even the abyss of the Indian Ocean was not enough to contain all the **** of old London Town. As barge after barge was emptied, the submarine pile grew greater and greater, until, finally, it broke the waves and began to tower above the assembled mariners, a new territory of turds, just waiting to be discovered by some unsuspecting explorer who was going to really regret stepping ashore to plant a flag on behalf of some bewigged king a long, long way away.

And so the deed was done: London was free of dog poo, my Uncle was ready to claim his reward, and the sailors were free to return to their wives and catamites in dear old Blighty.

Alas, as one might have come to expect in the life story of my Uncle Bertrand, it wasn't to end up quite like that: Starving and angry, the crews of the barges combined and cast my Uncle overboard to chance his luck in the open sea. He was rescued by a pod of dolphins, who took him safely to the shores of Hindustan, where his adventures continued - but they are not relevant to this tale. The sailors on the barges, however, were shortly swept to their deaths by an enormous typhoon, and never seen again.

Meanwhile, while my Uncle was busy inventing chicken tikka masala at the court of Shah Jahan, a certain Dutch sailor by the name of Willem Janszoon was unsuspectingly setting foot upon a previous undiscovered piece of land several thousand miles to the south east.

And the rest, as they say, is history...

Mingehound. I looked it up so I could go and buy one!

Hmm. Interested in your solution for dogs urinating on the street. Poop is obvious - us reponsible dog owners use the bags provided or provide our own (bags, not poop) but for urine what are you suggesting - doggy urinals? Portable power washers?

Now while I wouldn't mind popping a nappie on that little terrier, I would want you Uncle to step in and put one on Grumpy's rottie

I don't know what they're moaning about over in Geneva.

The situation in Bern is much worse:



... imagine stepping in that on your way to the shops!

Sorry. I was caught a bit short .

Oh cr@p! I need a bigger bag.

Dont forget this too...

Did you actually seriously just sit there and take the time to make that up yourself... over a... dog poo thread?

Don't try to pull turd over our eyes, DB. Those are giant slugs that invaded meadows after a spell of alkaline rain in South Doobeedo in May 1996. It was a good thing too that the inhabitants were fans of escargot baked with garlic and butter and versatile in taste to boot, so they merely hacked them up for their freezers.


By the way, potential Seeing-Eye pups are required by the 'Swiss Foundation for Guide Dogs for the Blind' to wee in the street gutter (between road and sidewalk), so please don't scold them and their guardians.
To do better, our ward tries her best to pee into the underground drain through a perforated drain cover and some appreciative residents have praised her for it. She doesn't always succeed though.

Just be careful not to pamper him.

Cheers,
Nick

No. I lifted it all from Wikipedia.

So now that everyone (and not just us antipodeans) knows the facts, it's all the more amazing to see how far we've come in just four centuries!

That would have been useful today when an elderly gentleman parked next to the river in front of our building, walked down to it to toss a plastic bottle into it, checked the oil level in his car, and threw an oil piece of paper towel at the base of a tree.....all within five meters of a trash can.
I was yelling at him the whole time because getting to a bridge to beat the crap out of him would have taken long enough to where he could have just driven off well before I got there. He was smoking a cigar with a enormous air of Swiss indifference. He had local plates....

Now you have a practical use for the dog poop left on the streets: carefully placed under the elderly gentleman's car-door handle.

Sounds like your own fault for living so close to France