A beautiful, viral-ready video that says something unique about the zeitgeist hits our feeds every couple of days. Something of a rarer phenomenon? A fly-tipping dog. This week, however, the two have coalesced.
It probably needn’t even be said: the video is perfect. Posted to the city of Catania’s official Facebook page, we see some miraculously crisp CCTV footage of a small dog (there’s definitely some Jack Russell in there) trotting along a barren road dragging a fairly hefty bag of rubbish. He neatly places it at the roadside, before looking back to see if anyone’s watching him. He’s nervous? Because he’s fly-tipping? Because he knows he’s fly-tipping? Because he knows, somehow, that fly-tipping is illegal, and maybe harbors suspicions as to why that might be the case? He’s a Sicilian Jack Russell with a bout of climate anxiety?
The mind boggles.
The dog has obviously been trained. Even whomever posted it to Facebook can’t deny that this is, on some level, extremely sick: “Ingenuity can never become an alibi for uncivilization,” reads the caption. They also note that it’s exploitative, calling the fly-tipping “a behavior that tries to escape the rules by taking advantage of the unconscious four-legged friend.”
Fair enough. But is training your dog to fly-tip actually that bad? I called a dog behavior charity’s helpline to find out. Within minutes, I’d invented a dog called Letty and was receiving a masterclass in how to train your pet for crime.
VICE: Did you see the dog in Sicily that was trained to be a fly-tipper? I’m not saying I wanna do that with my dog, but I just wondered if that would be harmful to her?
Dog charity worker: Sorry, what did it do?
It had been trained to fly-tip by its owner. The dog would pick up a bag of rubbish and then it would take it to a quiet road, but it was caught on CCTV.
I hadn’t heard about that. I guess in terms of training the dog, it would just be the same as teaching dogs to carry an item. Then you could build up the training to carrying something like a bin bag. Then you can train a dog to take it to a specific target, initially. And then you build it up to just sending the dog away with the item. Teaching them to drop it and then come back. If it was done in the right way, then the process of the training wouldn’t be harmful to the dog. As long as there’s not any, obviously, harmful stuff in the bag that they’re carrying.
“Yes, the dog may well get serotonin from it”
My dog’s very confident, so I was just thinking of what I could get her to do.
You get people that teach their dogs to put things in the bin, or put their toys away. It’s a similar concept to getting them to do jobs like that, isn’t it? We can teach our dogs to do a whole array of things for us. I dunno if you’ve heard of “man training” before? It’s up-and-coming at the moment. It builds on scent work. The person goes off and hides somewhere, then the dog gets a big reward when they find them.
That seems more basic than training it to fly-tip. If I did let my dog… deliver something for me—say a big bag of rubbish, to the side of a quiet road—would she face the consequences for it if she got caught or would I?
I don’t know exactly how the law would look at that. Obviously she is your responsibility.
The dog in Sicily seemed quite happy doing fly-tipping.
Obviously, we don’t want to sort of use our dogs to do anything illegal, but I suppose doing fun training with our dogs—people teach their dogs to ride scooters—doesn’t really hold much of a purpose for the dog apart from being that mental stimulation that they get. There’s lots of activities we can do with our dogs.
The dog who’s doing the fly-tipping must have had a strong relationship with his owner.
Yeah. You would have to work on you being able to give your dog commands at a distance. Like sheep dogs, for example. They obviously get sent away and through certain commands—whistles, whatever it may be—they do what their owner tells them. There has to be a bond and understanding there for that to happen.
Obviously this is just the latest in a long list of recent animal-human crime partnerships. There was the bank robber in Turkey who escaped on the back of a donkey. Did you hear about the chicken shop in Latvia that trained its cat to kill pigeons?
Uh, no. Obviously that’s a cat’s instinctive behavior.
When they investigated, they found out he’d trained the cat to do it. Otherwise it was quite a docile cat.
To be fair, I haven’t heard about that.
I think there was even a hamster in Bristol that was running county lines. Did you hear about that?
No, I hadn’t heard about that one.
I’m wondering whether my dog would get more of a thrill out of doing these kinds of things because they’re illegal?
I don’t think our dogs can understand that line between right and wrong. It’s more about the training involved and the bond they’ve got with their owner. But yes, they may well get serotonin from it. In terms of it being a thrill because of it being illegal, I don’t think that would make a difference to the dog. I don’t think?
So, if I did want to train her to take something somewhere, it would just be a case of doing it for a short distance, then increasing it?
Yeah. You’d be teaching her to hold an item and then just building it up slowly.
Did you see about the ferret that was pickpocketing people in London?
No. I mean, it is quite amazing what we do with our animals.
Have you got a dog?
Yeah, I do have dogs.
Would you ever train them to do fly-tipping?
No, I wouldn’t do that.
Follow Amber on Instagram @amberawlings
The post A Fly-Tipping Dog Has Been Caught by Sicilian Police. Here’s How to Train Your Own appeared first on VICE.
