How did “curb your dog” come to mean “clean up your dog’s poop?”
I think it originally meant “don’t let them poop on the sidewalk.” The obligation to pick it up came about later.
I took it to mean “curb” in the sense of “restrain” or “keep in control”, as opposed to just letting your mutt shit everywhere. The fact that it also often happens at the edge of a road is gravy.
Come to think of it, the term “curb”, meaning “edge of the road” isn’t to far from that definition. The edging’s purpose is to keep an out of control vehicle on the street.
I think it meant have your dog poop in the street next to the curb not on the sidewalk. I never took it to mean “curb,” in the sense of “control.”
Thread title edited to indicate subject.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
It doesn’t really mean “clean up after your dog.” According to Merriam-Webster, the meaning of the verb is:
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. When I first saw signs with the phrase in the 1950s or 1960s, it clearly meant to only allow your dog to defecate near the curb of the street, where rain or streetsweepers would push the waste into the stormsewers. If the dog defecates anywhere else, as on the sidewalk or grass, the waste will stick around a lot longer (especially on the bottom of your shoe).
I’ve never heard of the expression “curb your dog” but it did immediately make me think of American History X. Hopefully nobody is doing that to their dog.
Curiously, I never heard the expression here in the midwest. Never saw it before I moved to New York City.
I never heard the expression before I went to NYC either.
Does “curb your dog” mean “pick up after your dog” in NYC?
It seems to also have a strong overtone of “Do not let your dog pee on this tree/shrubbery/flowers/whatever”, as that’s often where the sign is posted.
No.
The current regulation requires you to pick up after your dog, and modern signs say “It’s the law. Clean up after your dog.”
However, there are still plenty of old “Curb your dog” signs around from when it was only required to have the dog defecate at the curb. Recently it has been decreed that these old signs should be taken down.
Different sites say that the law requiring curbing your dog was passed in either the 1930s or the 1960s, but there was low compliance. The law requiring actually picking up the waste dates to 1978.
Interesting. I don’t know that I ever saw an “official” CYD sign. Most of them seemed to be private, put up by property owners.
I grew up in the days when you took groceries home in paper bags (even before cashiers started to ask “paper or plastic?”). I won’t say there were no plastic bags back then (if I do I figure someone will probably correct me), but they were certainly far far less common. So, actually picking up after your dog wasn’t common. As others have said “curb your dog” really did mean drag your mutt over to the curb whenever he tried to do his business.
I haven’t owned a dog for many decades, which may be a good thing - I still have a “Eww!!” reaction when I hear about or see someone picking up after their critter. I suspect I would end up being naughty a lot of the time if I had one.
