Gone are the days of anonymous dog droppings. Now, apartment complexes such as Twin Ponds in Nashua, New Hampshire are employing a dog DNA analysis system able to expose which community member was responsible for malodorous negligence.
Deb Logan is the apartment manager of Twin Ponds, a 339-apartment facility home to 241 dogs. Logan told Reuters that the DNA technology “PooPrints” (a product of Knoxville Tennessee’s BioPet Vet Labs) is working “amazingly” for the community.
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Consumer Reports listed dog poop as number six on the list of America’s Top Gripes in 2010. As such, services of this nature are growing increasingly widespread throughout dog-friendly communities such as Twin Ponds, who take canine sanitation quite seriously (some issuing as much as $1,000 fines for each incident.)
Here’s how Twin Ponds implements its program: Any new dog owning tenant is asked to use a “PooPrints” DNA sampling kit when they move into the community to create their pet’s profile. They do this by swabbing for a saliva sample, which is then sent to BioPet to update its reference database for Twin Ponds’ canines.
In the event that residents (still have the guts to) fail to clean after their dogs, a sample of the forgotten feces is sent to the lab for DNA analysis. BioPet boasts a 99.9% accuracy rate.
BioPet president, Jim Simpson insists, “It’s really not a Big Brother-type thing. The program is doing what we want it to do and what the property manager wants it to do – simply encourage folks to clean up after their dogs.”
It’s not a bad idea, considering the average dog discards 276 pounds of excrement per year. There are 77.5 million pet dogs in the United States alone.
