An irresponsible dog owner isn't going to stop and look at this poster. If they did, it likely wouldn't make any difference to their behaviour. After all, PC Copper threatening the risk of an occasional £75 fine vs always picking up dog waste... Sounds like a good deal to me.
The implication of this is other places may actually say yes to dog fouling. In fact if I were put up a poster with my stupid grinning face next to a massive pile of turds saying "Yes! to dog fouling" would everyone suddenly go "oh. Ok then"? I somehow doubt it.
People who are lazy, stupid or generally irresponsible are not best reached through the use of posters. The very people who will look at this are those who will agree that 'something should be done'.
Enough of these same people obviously think taking this picture and putting together an uninteresting poster is actually doing something about the problem. It isn't.
If there really is a problem then really do something about it. That will mean confronting people, fining them, perhaps having a mob with flaming torches hunt them down. Because I doubt there's many in the Redcar & Cleveland area who genuinely think letting their dog take a dump on the pavement and leaving it there is really ok.
But personal morals are heavily influenced by the expectations of the community/peers, especially for marginal issues.
ReplyDeleteNot many years ago, just about everyone let their dog foul the streets. Surely, it's only by this sort of campaign that people (individually) decide that they fall short of others' expectations and then decide, "oh all right then, everyone else is cleaning up, I'd better do it too".
There will be many people who actually don't really have a strong view on whether it's OK to let their dog foul a street. But if they're the only one doing it and the continual message is that the general expectation is that they should not be doing it then ultimately, they may feel enough guilt(?) to be influenced.
Interestingly, I suspect that you can go too far. If the pavements are littered, and there are repeated advertisements, then the message that a person gets is just the opposite: "everyone else is clearly ignoring the signs, so it must be ok to ignore them too".