Spanish town posts dog mess back to offending hound owners - in an official box marked 'Lost Property' -
A Spanish town has come up with an ingenious way to keep its streets clean of dog mess – by sending the offending deposits back to the owners in an official box marked 'Lost Property'.
The council of Brunete, a small town some 20 miles west of Madrid, launched the campaign to crack down on irresponsible dog owners.
During the course of a week a team of twenty volunteers patrolled the town's streets on the lookout for dog owners who failed to scoop. They then approached the guilty owner and struck up a casual conversation to discover the name of the dog.
"With the name of the dog and the breed it was possible to identify the owner from the registered pet database held in the town hall," explained a spokesman from the council.
The volunteers then scooped up the excrement and packaged it in a box branded with town hall insignia and marked 'Lost Property' and delivered by courier to the pet owners home.
The campaign, developed for free by advertising agency McCann, won the "Sol de Plata" award at last weekend's Ibero-American Advertising Festival.
In all, 147 "express poop" deliveries were made during the course of the week in February and the town with 10,000 residents has since reported a 70 per cent drop in the amount of dog mess found in its streets.
The year before a similar attempt to tackle the issue saw offending dog owners chased by a remote controlled dog mess on wheels with the label "Don't leave me – pick me up".
In Hernani, a town in the Basque Country in northern Spain, the council introduced a by-law two years ago forcing pet owners to register their dog's DNA so that they could be traced if their excrement was found in the streets or parks.
Read more -
No comments:
Post a Comment