Legal Library: New York’s Poop Scoop Law: Dogs, the Dirt, and Due Process

Posted by lukegilman

July 20, 2008

The New Yorker’s Scooped details the story of “Section 1310 of the New York State Public Health Law, which formally decrees, “It shall be the duty of each dog owner . . . to remove any feces left by his dog on any sidewalk, gutter, street, or other public area,”"

Michael Brandow, a freelance dogwalker in the Village, hadn’t had much luck interesting publishers in a nonfiction manuscript that he’d been working on for the past eight years. In 2006, in the course of his research, he called Alan Beck, a professor of animal ecology at Purdue. Beck happens to edit a line of books about the bond between humans and animals for P.U. Press, and he told Brandow that he’d give the manuscript a look. “I read it and thought, This is a really neat book,” Beck said recently. “So I wrote to our publisher and said, ‘Over the years, I’ve given you a lot of shit, but this is a good one.’ ” The result is a three-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page social history entitled “New York’s Poop Scoop Law: Dogs, the Dirt, and Due Process.”

The book is due for release on August 1st.