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Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

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Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't keep humans in place, who don't want to stay in place. If you paid some benighted town in the Great Plains $500/head to accept your homeless, that town would just buy each transplanted San Francisco resident a sandwich and a bus ticket, pocketing the rest. It would soon become a joke on SF streets, "yeah I just got back from Nebraska!"

The suggestion was to put them in jails for defecating on the street, property damage, hard drug use and harassment. I'm not sure if you've been to SF lately or not but it's out of control. It's definitely not just innocent people sitting around, there's a large segment of the homeless population there harassing people, fighting with each other and damaging things. That's definitely breaking the law.

Sure, throw them in a local jail, if you've got any room there. What piqued my interest was this idea that "USA is really big". True, but beside the point. You can't imprison people 2,000 miles away for nuisance crimes.

Lots of people would be really happy for SF to set aside some land in the city for new jails. Still, that seems less practical than just opening some public restrooms...

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#82
The problem is not so much their poop, it's the pets themselves. For example, in USA, 25% of the meat production is meant for pets [1], it's huge, given also that meat production is not environmental-friendly. The whole pets products industry is really large, there are maybe close to 1 billion pets worldwide. Other example, cats affect negatively ecosystems (birds, little reptiles, some important insects, ..)

My proposition is simply to cut down pets population, how? I don't know, a law if necessary, nowadays the environment comes before having a toy animal in your home. It's an easy thing to do with a significant impact, there are others, like cosmetic products, plastic wrappings, ..

[1]: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/503376/all-meat-pet-food..., https://www.treehugger.com/pets/cats-dogs-meat-environmental...

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#83
More broadly, the San Francisco livability crisis is out of control. Poop is only a visible and easily disagreeable symptom of the broader problem.

The local government can patch symptoms of the problem but some of them (housing, mental health, opioid epidemic) are state-level or national problems that the local government have very little power or ability to solve. Some of the law and order issues are issues the local govt can solve, but there isn't an incentive to solve them.

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#85

You could actually enforce the laws and put people in safe jails with better living conditions than they have now, outside the city limits. It seems like being more and more lenient is not a solution to a problem getting worse and worse.

Put homeless people in jails? For being homeless?

That's what the coasts have come to, I guess.

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#86
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually since it's a fixed, semi-private location, it seems really easy to monitor for drug deals. As other comments said it's almost easier to just do deals in public/daylight since not every spot on the sidewalk can be watched at all times.

That’d be great if San Francisco had enough police to monitor for anything. As it is, drug deals happen in broad daylight on Market St anyway because nobody’s gonna stop them.

Even if you had everything monitored, you still have a drug problem.

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#87
post #24
post #12

SF needs the Portland Loo.[1][2] The homeless-resistant public toilet. Not enough privacy for a drug deal. Water faucet on the outside, not the inside. Prison-grade stainless. [1] https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2012-aug-29-la-na-08-29... [2] https://portlandloo.com/

The idea that drug dealing is such a harmful thing (it's not) that we must deny homeless and poor people the basic human dignity of being able to use a toilet in privacy to avoid people being able to engage in it is an idea that needs to be extinguished.

drug dealing can be harmful, but you are correct otherwise of course.

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#88

The problem is not so much their poop, it's the pets themselves. For example, in USA, 25% of the meat production is meant for pets [1], it's huge, given also that meat production is not environmental-friendly. The whole pets products industry is really large, there are maybe close to 1 billion pets worldwide. Other example, cats affect negatively ecosystems (birds, little reptiles, some important insects, ..) My prop…

this went from being environmentally sensitive to culling species wholesale real fast

remember last time we culled cats what happened?

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#89

The problem is not so much their poop, it's the pets themselves. For example, in USA, 25% of the meat production is meant for pets [1], it's huge, given also that meat production is not environmental-friendly. The whole pets products industry is really large, there are maybe close to 1 billion pets worldwide. Other example, cats affect negatively ecosystems (birds, little reptiles, some important insects, ..) My prop…

"The animal parts used for pet food may include damaged carcass parts, bones, and cheek meat, and organs such as intestines, kidneys, liver, lungs, udders, spleen, and stomach tissue"[1].

These are all byproducts of the meat industry for humans. Humans don't eat any of these animal parts. Pets are doing us a favor by eating all these things that would otherwise simply be thrown away, with a great deal of pollution involved. Eating our leftovers is, in fact, the traditional role that dogs have played in human societies.

Reduction in meat consumption has to come from humans, because we actually have a choice. We can (and do) also control pet populations with spaying and neutering programs.

1. http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Pet-Food.html#ixzz662tVEXrH

Re: Trends in the San Francisco (mostly dog?) poop crisis

#90
post #40

Mods - can we update the title to “San Francisco dog poop crisis” ? Note that the category of tickets in 311 is “Human / Animal waste”. I personally went through 100 random tickets on the sf data portal and found that 95% were either dog poop or miss classified (eg abandoned car or trash collection). People automatically read the headline and correlate to human waste.

I wouldn't mind half the police force being reassigned to fine the sort of people who let their dog shit and run. My buddy had a small garden patch on the sidewalk in front of his house. It was the only patch of garden on the block, so it was basically chock full of dog feces within a day after he cleaned it from people walking their dogs. You'd get a whiff of it just walking to his house. He eventually had the tiny…

Yeh! I think it would really help law enforcement community relations if they moved away from ticketing people for violating letter of the law rules (street sweeping hours, etc.) and started ticketing people for stuff that lowers quality of life in the city: taking up two parking spots by not pulling forward all the way, not picking up dog poop, parking in bike lanes, etc.
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