Party poopers: New Yorkers sniff at pet owners leaving behind animal waste

Kumar Satya has lived in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood since 2017 and said he loves the local parks, how people talk on the street and the sound of children “screaming, playing”.

“It was a very hot day two weeks ago, and you noticed tiny children just offering lemonade to people,” said Satya, a physician who has a 13-year-old son.

But in recent years, the neighborhood has become inundated with a hazardous eyesore: dog poop. This year, at least 175 people from the community board – a governmental body – that includes Washington Heights, filed dog waste complaints with the city; the second worst board has seen 116 complaints, according to the city.

“I grew up in India, where [open] defecation is a problem,” Satya said. “This reminds me of that.”

While the waste has been especially bad in Washington Heights, other neighborhoods and cities have also recently seen an uptick in poop left on the ground – prompting the city to take action. New York officials have tried to address the problem through enforcement of a law that fines people for not picking up poop, but they say that catching irresponsible dog owners is very difficult.

Now, city council members have introduced a handful of bills they hope will encourage dog owners to become better neighbors and make sidewalks less treacherous.

“It’s a quality-of-life issue, which just makes people angry that people are not picking up after their dogs,” said Julie Menin, the New York City council speaker. “We are not looking to penalize anyone here; we are just looking to encourage people to do the right thing.”

People failing to pick up after dogs is, of course, not a new issue, but US residents and public officials say the problem has gotten worse in recent years. That appears to be, at least in part, because pet ownership has steadily increased over the past few decades – particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people became more isolated.

In 2016, there were 76 million pet dogs in the United States, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. In 2021, there were almost 88 million.

That has correlated with an increase in complaints filed about people not picking up dog waste. The Guardian requested data from New York City on the number of annual complaints concerning dog waste since 2019, but Ray Legendre, a spokesperson for the office of technology and innovation, only provided numbers for 2022 onwards. Asked why he declined to provide data from 2019 to 2021, Legendre did not respond.

But there has been a steady uptick even after the pandemic. In 2022, the city received 2,100 complaints. In 2025, the city received 2,659. And this year, the city has already received more than 2,400. Legendre attributed the spike to the blizzard. The subsequent snow melt revealed weeks of dog waste.

Other cities have faced the same problem. In San Francisco, the average neighborhood saw a 400% increase in complaints to the city’s 311 hotline about dog or human waste between 2012 and 2021, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

In the United Kingdom, so many people started leaving poop bags on branches during the pandemic that the Daily Record labeled the scene the “the hanging gardens of jobbylon”. (Jobby is a British nickname for poop.)

Dog excrement not only looks bad and irritates those who step in it, but also can harm public health because it contains bacteria, pathogens and parasites, which during heavy rain can contaminate local water.

Part of the problem is people simply not paying attention when walking their dogs, said Harry Berberian, a Brooklyn resident who has a dog, Stevie, and works for a dog rescue organization, the Sato Project.

“I am one of those neighbors who goes out of my way to say something because I often observe people who are either on a phone call or busy taking care of something else,” Berberian said of walking in Fort Greene Park. Even though he tries to be polite, “most people are not very pleased”.

Other people just don’t care about littering.

Crystal Lee and her neighbors in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood have witnessed the same person walking two dogs, repeatedly letting them poop on the sidewalk and then casually walking away. They have captured him on camera and confronted him about picking up the poop.

“He has basically said, ‘F-you,’” said Lee, a nurse and owner of a dog, Snowboard.

In one case, a resident picked up the poop, followed him home and dropped it off at his door.

Lee also submitted screenshots of the video in a complaint to the city in May. The next day, the department of sanitation stated that it had investigated the complaint and found no violation.

“It’s just incredibly frustrating,” Lee said. “Either I just accept that I’m going to continue to have to pick up after his dogs when they land in front of my property, or I can go nuclear and be like, let’s post pictures of this guy, this repeat offender, and see if he has any shame.”

New York City has seen the uptick in waste even though it was a trailblazer when, in 1978, it passed the “Pooper-Scooper Law” and became the first major US city to require its citizens to pick up after the pets. People who fail to do so can be fined up to $250.

But it’s difficult to enforce. In 2025, the sanitation department conducted patrols in Washington Heights, Harlem, Morningside Heights and Flatbush – in response to 311 complaints – but could not catch anyone, according to a spokesperson. The city issued a total of two summons last year.

“The chances of someone not picking up after their dog while an enforcement officer is watching is very, very slim,” Vincent Gragnani, press secretary for the sanitation department, stated in an email.

Instead, city council members recently introduced the Safe and Clean Outdoor Ownership Practices (Scoop) Act, which contains legislation that would require agencies to regularly fill waste bag dispensers next to litter baskets, install signs about penalties for dog waste, establish a pilot program to collect dog feces as part of a composting program and conduct an outreach campaign about the dangers of failing to remove the waste, among other measures.

“There is no excuse when there are going to be these dog waste bags on litter baskets,” Menin, the council speaker, said. “It’s not an enforcement approach. It’s an education, awareness and deterrent approach.”

Diane O’Dwyer, a frustrated Washington Heights resident, wants the city to do more to punish negligent dog owners. She once saw a woman step out of her convertible, throw a poop bag in the street and enter a bodega. O’Dwyer, a home healthcare aide who was walking her dogs, threw the bag in the car and ran.

She thinks enforcement is possible and pointed to aggressive efforts in the United Kingdom, where she once lived. In Liverpool, the city hired a contractor to crack down on littering and handed out 45 fines in July 2025, the BBC reported.

“I know it’s a tough city to deal with,” O’Dwyer said of New York, “but don’t have fines posted and not enforce them.”

The Guardian wp:paragraph