Islington Council is at long last getting its act together with dog control orders (click here).  They are proposing complete doggy bans from play areas where there are likely to be kids present who we don’t want rolling in dog poo.  In the Kings Cross patch

• The sports pitch in Bingfield Park
• Fenced playground at rear of Coatbridge Hse. Fenced playground at the side of Perth Hse. Fenced kids play ground at rear 80 -108 Pembroke St
• Play area next to 14 Delhi St. Football pitch opposite 27 Outram Pl. and pitch next to Vibart Walk
• Edward Square Part of site – main site will be dogs excluded, they will be allowed in the orchard area on Copenhagen St.
• Children’s play area opposite 50 Tiber Gardens.

Across the whole of Islington there will be offences of ‘Not putting and keeping a dog on a lead, when asked to by an authorised officer’ and ‘Failing to remove dog fouling’. Fines are set at £80.  This is long overdue.  The streets particularly North of the canal are littered with dog shit.  It can make children quite ill and even cause blindness.

Bingfield Park is a giant dog toilet.  The sheer volume of dog poo puts off local youth groups.  If you sit in the sun on the park in the summer an endless stream of badly controlled dogs come bounding up to jump up paw and slobber all over you.   The dogs aren’t necessarily aggressive, just out of control with thoughtless, incompetent owners.  I am disappointed not to see a ‘dogs on leads’ order for Bingfield Park and will see where that has got to.

There is inevitably a 19 page ‘Dog Strategy’ – which describes itself without irony as ‘a framework within which to address dog fouling‘ (the less charitable could construe this as meaning the strategy is a framed piece of dog poo, or a place that just talks dog shit).  Consultation ends on 11th April, with orders being enforced in May.  This bit of the dog poo framework sounds like bad news:

‘7.3.1 The strategy recommends that dog owners should always clean up after their pet/s and therefore resources will be targeted on making disposal easier, with an emphasis on education and enforcement rather than cleansing. Cleansing is expensive, requires ongoing resource allocation and encourages people not to act as responsible dog owners.’

On the whole it doesn’t sound like a very good strategy – lots of legalistic repetition of previous (failed) legislation with little focus on how enforcement will work and no real sense of how to change behavior amongst large numbers of careless dog owners.  You can respond online here.  Or email them here.  Thanks to Paul Convery and Jennifer Christie for alerting.