THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508130096
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY HOPE KELLER, SPECIAL TO THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
AH, SUMMER in Paris. Once again the tourists pack the square in front of Notre Dame basking in the sun, examining maps, snapping pictures . . . and complaining about the dogs.
Or, to be precise, about the dog droppings, ``les crottes de chien'' as they're called here.
They're as ubiquitous as baguettes and bicycles, though generally not featured on posters. Dog owners wouldn't dream of cleaning up after their pets, nor would the government dare ask voters to adopt such an Anglo-Saxon mania as picking up ``les crottes.''
``It's like they're a magnet for my feet,'' said Michael Zielenziger, a visitor from Palo Alto, Calif., who, like several tourists interviewed recently, admitted to a sidewalk mishap.
According to a member of the Paris city council, speaking at a meeting this spring, there were 650 falls and hospitalizations last year due to what the French also refer to as ``les dejections canines.''
The French capital has about 250,000 dogs, according to the Association for Information and Research on Domestic Animals here. Most of them are small, and most of them go everywhere: restaurants, bars, stores, sometimes inside the oversized handbag of their owners.
They generally behave well, rarely barking, but many tourists are scandalized.
Seventeen-year-old Emily Sabin, part of a school group from Independence, Iowa, said flatly: ``You don't take dogs into a restaurant.''
``We were warned about it,'' confided her friend Kara Van Den Berg, also 17. ``Our teacher said they were part of the family.''
Beth Hill, 17, also with the Independence group, rolled her eyes.
``You can't walk with food into a store, but you can with a dog,'' she said. ``It's not clean.''
Certainly the sidewalks are not.
A local veterinary school estimates that the average Parisian dog weighs 8 kilograms and each day produces 100 grams of ``humid material.'' Do the math and that's 25 tons a day that pedestrians must navigate in obstacle-course fashion.
The city spends 42 million francs ($8.5 million) a year to clean up the mess, using a brigade of green-and-white ``moto-crottes'' - motorcycles equipped with vacuum cleaners. But these ride-on pooper scoppers succeed in picking up only 5.5 tons a day, according to the city. That's only 22 percent of the total daily ``dejections.''
Another official attempt at cleanliness is a silhouette of a dachshund, painted on the sidewalks, with an arrow underneath pointing to the gutters, which are flushed daily.
But judging from the number of sidewalk silhouettes that have themselves been soiled, the city's canine inhabitants seem to have a very Parisian disdain for municipal authority.
On a recent Saturday morning, several residents of Paris' 10th Arrondissement struck back.
Using the theme: ``Paris, its Eiffel Tower, its gastronomy, its dog droppings,'' a small group of professors, filmmakers and artists divided up into teams.
One spread out over a two-block area and drew chalk circles around each ``crotte.'' More than 200 were circled.
A second group followed, laying out silverware, napkins and wine glasses next to the circled matter, adding lettuce leaves and tomato slices as trimmings.
``It's intended to shock, to make the thing itself flagrant and obscene,'' said an organizer of the ``happening,'' which was chronicled in the daily newspaper Liberation.
Zielenziger, the tourist from California, was visiting on his way back from a business trip to India.
Paris has nothing on that country when it comes to animal droppings.
``There they have cows,'' he said. ``They don't have dogs as pets.'' MEMO: Hope Keller is a former Virginian-Pilot staff writer who now lives in
Paris. ILLUSTRATION: SAM HUNDLEY/Staff
by CNB