Combating Canine ‘Visiting Cards’: Public Hygiene and the Management of Dog Mess in Paris since the 1920s

Summary

This article examines the history of dog mess in Paris, from its ‘discovery’ in the late 1920s to the management regime of the early twenty-first century. Mayor Jacques Chirac’s anti-excrement campaigns in the 1980s are a particular focus. Situating the meaning and management of dog mess within histories of public hygiene and disgust, and mobilising insights from work on public hygiene, biopolitics and governmentality, this article shows how Chirac’s attempt to produce self-regulating and responsible dog owners through education failed to persuade them to overcome their disgust at their pets’ excrement. Fining alongside education proved a more effective management strategy. The history of dog mess in Paris highlights the biopolitical problems raised by animal excrement decades after the apogee of the public hygiene movement, and shows how human–animal partnerships expose the limits of governmentality approaches to public hygiene and neo-liberal urban governance.