THE LOCAL Council has been exploring a DNA scheme to track down dogs that fall ‘foul’ of the law, however it has determined that without a change in the law it is unlikely to work.
At December’s meeting of its regeneration and community committee, councillors requested the Council contact Leitrim County Council to find out how successful its pilot DNA testing scheme to combat dog fouling had been.
A follow-up report published this month by its director of community and wellbeing, John Boyle, outlined how Leitrim had first introduced the scheme in April 2021.
It involved the Leitrim Dog Warden Service taking samples from dog waste found in areas where dog fouling was particularly prevalent, and testing it against samples of saliva taken from dogs in the same area.
However, during the pilot project, which has now ended, only 10 samples were taken from the dog waste, and they were tested against a database of just 50 dog samples. These samples had been taken from dogs which had been held in the local pound.
“Unfortunately, there were no matches with the samples taken, due to the limited size of the local database,” said Mr Boyle in the report.
He added that the limited number of dog DNA samples on file would prevent the scheme from being effective, and added it was also a costly process.
“Although there was widespread publicity as a result of the pilot, the cost of undertaking the service proved prohibitive,” he said, noting the swab kit cost €44 per dog, the waste kit cost €13 per dog, and the extracting and testing of DNA cost €57 per dog.
“It was suggested that for this approach to work properly, it would require a legislative change to make it compulsory for all dogs to be sampled and entered on a national database. Currently samples can only be taken voluntarily.”
Mr Boyle added that in the past the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) Minister had ruled out plans to introduce legislative powers to compel dog owners to submit swabs of their dogs’ DNA.
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