Over for Rover? A modest proposal for keeping the sidewalks of Cuenca clean

Walk any calle in Cuenca and you’ll see two things that never change: the tiled roofs overhead and the brown deposits underfoot. For every mural that brightens a wall, there’s a pile of dog poop decorating the pavement. It’s the city’s most democratic hazard and rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods are all equally blessed.

Now, over in Bolzano, Italy, some bright official thinks he has the answer: charge every visiting dog a tourist tax. €1.50 a night for casual canine cruising, €100 a year for resident hounds, with the money earmarked (no pun intended) for cleaning streets and building dog parks.

Critics call it madness, an “own goal,” and a plan that potentially turns chow-chows into cash cows. I don’t disagree. Imagine telling Cuenca’s street dogs they owe back taxes. You’d need a whole department of barking tax inspectors on foot.

But the Italians did try something interesting before this tax idea. They required dogs to give DNA samples in the form of a swab, just like on CSI. The goal was to trace any sidewalk deposit back to its owner’s owner. In practice, almost no one signed up for the program, so the only thing the city collected was ridicule.

Could Cuenca make this work? The nation already microchips people if you consider that your cédula is a kind of bureaucratic implant, only plastic. Why not extend the system to Rover and Clover?

You leave a pile on a Calle Larga sidewalk, the inspector swabs it, runs it against the canine database, and next thing you know there’s a multa waiting in your email in-box or your Whatsapp messages.

Still, Cuenca isn’t Italy. Here, most of the culprits aren’t pampered lapdogs but the free-roaming street dogs that belong to everybody and nobody. They don’t wear collars, let alone carry canine cédulas. DNA-testing them would take half the city budget, and you’d run out of Q-tips before you ran out of samples.

Maybe the answer is simpler: public bins stocked with little biodegradable bags, and a fine for owners caught empty-handed. Combine that with more dog parks, and people might just change their habits. Until then, mind your step.

In Cuenca, the cobbles are ancient, but there are always fresh surprises for los peatones.