Who Is Pooping on My Lawn?

Do you ever wonder where that dog poop on the front lawn is coming from? You never see which dog in the neighborhood is relieving himself in your yard but there it is, every day.

An apartment complex owner in Massachusetts has solved the poop mystery after repeatedly telling apartment renters to pick up after their dogs. When a dog owner rents one of her apartments, she requires them to have a DNA test done on their dog, and then if she finds a dog poop on the grounds of the complex, she takes a sample.

The apartment manager then sends the dog poop sample to a DNA testing facility and gets the results back in a few days. The dog’s DNA is matched up with the DNA records she has on file from the dog owner’s in the apartment complex.

When she discovers which dog owner is not picking up after his or her dog, the dog owner must pay a fine. If there are repeat offenses, the dog owner must either to move out of the complex or find another home for the dog.

So, if you really want to find out which neighborhood dog is pooping on your lawn, you could try DNA testing. Even if you don’t have a record of the dog’s DNA, the poop sample can be tested for the breed of the dog.

Image Credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADog_defecation_1.jpg
By Minghong (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons