Dog shit problem in Porto

The title is not a very prosaic one, but I hope it gets the message out loud and clear.

I’ve been living in Porto for three years now and this has been a persistent issue. From my observation, it is still a very small minority of owners who don’t clean after their dogs and are, in fact, consistently terrorizing their neighborhoods.

What makes it worse is that the rest of their neighbors are ignoring the problem instead of treating it is as a public health issue. This includes the city officials who are doing nothing to post signs in the streets where such practice is common and enforce the existing laws. They probably have the streets around the touristy city center cleaned more often and that is about it.

It does not take a PhD in medicine or biology to figure out that there are no differences between, say, dog’s and their owner’s shit. There are small children and elderly with compromised immune systems walking these same sidewalks decorated with feces. Besides just being an annoying and smelly thing that can ruin your afternoon, dog feces can contain dangerous parasites that can fuck you up for the rest of your life.

I hope I am not coming across as yet another spoiled estrangeiro busy taking care of his paradise. I lived in NYC for decades, the place that has had vast variety of crime, health and cleanliness problems, but amazingly dog shit was not one of them. One of my favorite stories was from my german friend who was visiting me and told me: ‘I was just walking around the neighborhood and saw this 2m tall guy, all muscle, gold chains, gold teeth, walking his dog, bending down and picking the shit up’.