“Terrible practice” of not disposing dog waste in parks has to stop: Coquitlam mayor

The mayor of Coquitlam is sounding off about irresponsible dog owners who are choosing to sling their  dogs’ excrement versus disposing it in the garbage.

Calling it a “terrible practice”, mayor Richard Stewart says the problem isn’t with the dogs but with their owners. According to Stewart, on any given day at the entrance of the city’s Munday Park, there are several bags of dog waste just left on or near the trail. In some cases, some are even found hanging from the trees.

“They’ll wrap it in plastic and throw it in the bush,” Stewart told Global News. 

While he acknowledges it’s only some dog owners who are guilty of this practice and that it seems like a small issue, he says it still needs to be addressed.

“It produces an awful lot of dog poop in certain areas of the park and it can really damage local streams,” Stewart says. “We need to educate people, we need people to understand that this dog excrement attracts rats, it produces all sorts of disease within our forest.”

But what if the mayor’s idea of educating the public doesn’t work?

“We have penalties now and we’ll have to apply them… but we really just want people to understand how important this is.”