Anti-dog poo campaign goes Guerilla!

The HBC anti-dog poo campaign poster

If Dick Whittington visited Hastings and Saint Leonards, he’d be sad to find the streets were paved not with gold, but with dog muck. Dog-fouling isn’t just unsightly and unhygienic, it can lead to tragic and expensive accidents. A woman living in London Road slipped over in some of the brown stuff outside her house and broke her wrist. This meant she was no longer able to look after her disabled husband who had to be admitted to a care home.

All councils claim that dog-fouling is the highest complaint on their agenda, but we seem to get it even worse than other towns. Last August, Hastings Borough Council decided to put their foot down and hired Wave, the local award-winning design agency, to develop a hard-hitting campaign. The posters and flyers were well received and got positive national coverage, but the dog-fouling problem has not diminished.

As a result, enterprising residents seem to have taken the problem on board, and a variety of autonomous actions have been spotted around the streets of St Leonards. This spring, a series of three home-made A4 posters in plastic pockets were pinned along Carisbrooke Road, and the best one still remains, proclaiming “Poo on the Shoe — it could happen to you!”

This funny, friendly poster campaign inspired another local resident to address the problem. “Instead of carrying a packet of fags in my bag, I started carrying a packet of blackboard chalk,” she explained. “Every time I see a pile of dog muck, I circle it, and usually leave a polite message – something along the lines of ‘Bag it and bin it, spread the word, not the poo.’ I usually put ‘Please’ or a smiley face next to the message, too.”

“My thinking is that the people who don’t clear up after their dogs already know they are doing something nasty and anti-social. If you approach them with an angry message, they are bound to respond in an angry way. I try to keep my messages polite, and, if nothing else, the fact that I circle the poo with chalk means it is less likely that someone will tread in it by mistake. Since I’ve started ‘poo-circling’, there does seem to be less dog muck in my neighbourhood.”

Other residents have recently been taking a harder line on the mucky offenders, as shown in the photo below. And the Council hasn’t given up yet – a St Leonards resident was recently fined £500 for refusing to clean up after his dog, and September promises a new hard-hitting campaign, aiming to highlight the repercussions of dog fouling anywhere on the streets of Hastings & St Leonards. Councillor Phil Scott, lead member for environment at Hastings Borough Council, said: “We will continue to adopt a no-nonsense approach when it comes to this issue which residents feel strongly about, and if that means dishing out fines of over £500, so be it.”

Like a greyhound off the leash, this story will run and run, and Hastings Online Times will be following all further developments. Watch this space…

A local resident takes a harder line on dog-poo offenders.

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