Paris - After deploying its poop troops, Paris is turning to sad ads in its dogged battle against miscreant mutts that foul its sidewalks.
Mayor Jean Tiberi announced on Thursday a hard-hitting advertising campaign to discourage dog owners from letting their pets deposit 10 tonnes of excrement per day on the sidewalks of the French capital.
One short film shows a blind man hanging up his white cane at home after a walk. Dog excrement hangs from the bottom of it, and the announcer says: "You're right not to clean it up, he does it very well for you."
Other films in the campaign, due to run most of October with a series of posters, show the health and safety menace the slippery piles present for children and disabled people in wheelchairs.
Six hundred people end up in the hospital each year having slipped on it and clean-up costs total $10 million a year.
"Paris is the first in France to dare break a taboo...by showing various categories of people - the blind, the handicapped, children - for whom the problem has reached such a scale that it is no longer something to laugh about," the city hall said in a statement.
The city has struggled in vain for years to keep its sidewalks clean. One of its weapons has been a fleet of "pooper scooters" that are driven around vacuuming up excrement. - Reuters