Clean up or be fined

CLEAN up or face the consequences – this is the message from the environmental enforcement team.

If you don’t clean up your dog faeces, you could face a £50 fixed penalty notice or cause someone to go blind.

The council has recently introduced new powers to the environmental enforcement team, allowing them to issue fixed penalty notices for dog fouling offences. If payments are not made within 14 days the case is passed to the council’s legal team for prosecution.

A new campaign to raise awareness of the dangers of dog fouling has been launched, with a hard-hitting poster aimed at irresponsible dog owners. It contains an image of an amateur rugby player who has the toxacara virus in his left eye; the virus was caused when this player came into contact with dog faeces which had deposited on the playing fields used by his club.

Toxocara is a very serious infection that is transported to the eye via the retinal artery potentially causing blindness through the growth of non-malignant tumours or the development of detached retinas.

So to avoid all of this, clean up after your dog.

Ends

Issued by:  Gina Coldrick, Press Officer
Date:   Tuesday 6 May 2008
Release: Immediate