WASHINGTON — Joe Gillmer had a problem. A big, stinky, sole-troubling problem plaguing the condos where he serves as board vice president.
How to put this gently? Dog waste in the vestibule, in the elevator (yes, really) and — this particularly incensed Gillmer — in the garage next to handicapped parking, making life difficult for residents with physical challenges.
“What were we going to do?” Gillmer says. “Put up 13 cameras for $100,000 with the slim chance of catching the guy?”
Instead, the Midtown Alexandria Station condo association hired a service called PooPrints to match evidence from the crime scene to registered DNA taken from all condo dogs.
Gillmer has heard all the jokes: “CSI: Manure,” you name it. “I got a lot of criticism,” he says. “They called me the ‘Czar of Poop.’ “
But this is no laughing matter: Beyond the issues of odor, irritation and downright ickiness, pet messes pose serious sanitary problems.
After the service was started a year ago, “we only had to test one sample,” Gillmer says of the only scatological crime since committed — this in a building with 368 units and about 600 human and 60 canine residents. That’s the sort of success that law enforcement agencies can only dream of. Now, no one dares pooh-pooh the progress that has been made.
Among the great unresolved conflicts between neighbors has been determining the provenance of unwanted, unseemly and often unwittingly trampled dog detritus. Sometimes it leads neighbors to court. And sometimes the answer is treating a trouble area like a crime scene.
Thanks in part to a Tennessee scientist, Chesleigh Winfree, managers at housing developments and apartment buildings and members of homeowners associations and condo boards such as Gillmer are using DNA samples to solve the mystery of nasty end products.
PooPrints, a self-described “dog poop DNA matching service,” is the most successful product of BioPet Vet Lab in Knoxville, which specializes in canine genetic testing. Launched in late 2010, the company has on record the DNA of more than 30,000 dogs from Canada and 45 states, including Maryland and Virginia, and recently signed a deal to launch in Great Britain.
Winfree, along with two scientists who have since left the company, developed a process for swabbing dogs’ mouths for a DNA sample. The profiles are stored in a company database. Marble-sized specimens of offending waste are mailed to the company in bottles containing a stabilizer, then checked against the property’s registry, consistently yielding “highly viable” matches.
“I had read in scientific journals about successfully using DNA samples in waste to identify animals in the wild,” Winfree says.
She realized that the same process could be used to identify domesticated critters as well. “I think it’s a problem that’s not resolved by any other means.”
