What does New York City look like now, three weeks after a winter storm blanketed the city in pristine white snow? On a one-block stretch of Riverside Drive on Wednesday, between West 89th and West 90th Streets, a pedestrian had to step around 37 deposits of decaying dog poop.
Joggers two-stepped through a foul obstacle course; dog walkers bent to clean up after their own pets, leaving their neighbors’ sins behind. People pushing strollers or wheelchairs could only hope for clean passage, and then maybe wash their wheels when they got home.
From the start of the snowfall, a certain category of dog owner seemed to think that the city’s so-called pooper scooper law — surely, the heart of the social contract — no longer applied. Or, as a sign taped to trees in one neighborhood scolded, in verbose lowercase type: “just because you are entitled and it’s cold does not mean it isn’t rude disgusting pathetic + illegal to leave your dog’s feces on the sidewalk.”
If the city didn’t exactly go to the dogs, the dogs certainly went on the city. And this week, the reverberations sounded far beyond the five boroughs, somehow escalating in Congress to the introduction of a Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act, co-sponsored by eight U.S. representatives.
As of Tuesday, the city’s 311 line had received 888 complaints about dog waste this year, up from 519 over the same period last year.
In theory, the Department of Sanitation can issue $250 summonses to people who don’t clean up after their dogs, but only if an agent catches them in the act. The odds of this are slim. Last year, after a spate of 311 complaints, the department ran weeklong surveillance stings in Washington Heights, Harlem, Morningside Heights and Flatbush, which yielded a total of zero summonses.
Outside New York, communities and apartment complexes have taken high-tech measures to cut down on dog waste, requiring registries of doggy DNA samples to connect errant droppings to their sources. A company called PooPrints, based in Knoxville, Tenn., claims to have created registries for more than 1.2 million dogs in 8,000 localities. In Japan, it is customary for dog owners to spray water or disinfectant after their dog urinates or defecates.
New York is not currently considering any of these measures.
Instead, this week the city got a lesson in what happens when the stuff hits the social media fan. What started as a hyperlocal tweet about fetid sidewalks mushroomed into an anti-Islamic slur, death threats and calls for a U.S. representative to resign from office.
Nerdeen Kiswani, a prominent pro-Palestinian activist, was one of the people annoyed by all the dog waste, especially when she was pushing her 8-month-old child’s stroller in her Brooklyn neighborhood. So she posted on X, where her comments have regularly become lightning rods for conflict.
“Finally,” she wrote last Thursday, “NYC is coming to Islam. Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor pets. Like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.”
The post was partly a nod to the anti-poop movement, and partly a dig at people who had warned that Zohran Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, would institute Shariah law if elected, Ms. Kiswani said in an interview.
“I didn’t think it would be anything controversial,” she said. “It was just satire.”
So began a war of words that spread to Florida, London and Washington, D.C.
The next day, The Daily Mail, a conservative British tabloid, ran an article under the headline (since changed), “Famous Palestinian Activist Calls for Dogs to Be Banned as ‘Indoor Pets’ in NYC Because They Are UN-ISLAMIC.”
Then on Sunday, Representative Randy Fine, a Florida Republican who has previously made Islamophobic remarks on social media, took up the canine cause. “If they force us to choose,” he wrote on X, “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
The backlash was swift — from Democrats, if not from Republican legislators.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, called Mr. Fine “an Islamophobic, disgusting and unrepentant bigot” and “a disgrace to the United States Congress.” Gavin Newsom, the California governor and a likely 2028 Democratic presidential contender, posted, “Resign now, you racist slob.”
Mr. Fine has not backed down. As calls for his resignation mounted, he continued to ride the social media moment, announcing legislation that would “ban federal funds to any state or local government that considers dogs ‘haram.’” He named seven Republican representatives as co-sponsors and added, “Proceed accordingly, Mamdani.”
The forecast suggests more snow in New York this weekend. For those weary of the increasingly challenging sidewalk shuffle, the neighborhood poop wars may, perhaps, begin anew.
John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for The Times.
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