French Town to Crack Down on Dog Poop With DNA Database

You’d better think twice before leaving your dog poop on a sidewalk in this French town. Canine owners in Béziers will have to carry around a genetic passport in a bid to keep the streets of the town clean.

The Guardian reports that officials in Béziers will create a database of genetic data from dogs using swabs of their saliva taken by veterinarians. That info will then be used to create a genetic passport for each dog that the police can use to match an owner to the fecal matter they left behind on the sidewalk. Anyone found guilty of not cleaning up after their dog will face a fine of €122, currently about $137, and those caught without a genetic passport will be fined €38, or roughly $43. The trial only affects Béziers at the behest of Mayor Robert Ménard, and it’s currently planned to only run for two years until July 2025.

“We did a count and we pick up more than 1,000 messes a month, sometimes a lot more, just in the town centre. It just cannot go on,” Ménard said to France Bleu radio, as quoted by The Guardian. “There will be a certain lenience for those who are not from Béziers. If they pick up their dog dirt we won’t bother them. We’re not xenophobes. Foreigners aren’t the problem, it’s the locals who are not cleaning up.”

According to the outlet, Ménard proposed a similar scheme in 2016, but it was shut down by a local court as they believed it was an attack on personal freedom. Ménard submitted the idea to the local government again, and it passed without any objections.

Meanwhile in the U.S., luxury apartment complexes have been requiring this same responsibility from residents for several years, with companies like PooPrints offering doggy DNA testing as a privatized service for landlords and property managers. One TikTok user published a video documenting a copy of the letter she received from her unnamed apartment complex requiring informing pet owners that they’d need to spend $50 to swab their dog’s cheek and that any poop found on the premises would result in a $350 fine.