About
About this
This site exists to return one word to its meaning. Curbing your dog means taking the dog to the curb. It stopped meaning that somewhere around 1978, and nobody announced the change.
What it is for
Not enforcement. Not shaming. There is no complaint form here and there will not be one. The whole intervention is the size of a sentence: curb first, then bag — walk the dog a few steps further before you let it stop.
The reason it seemed worth a website rather than a grumble is that the mistake is genuinely interesting. Most people breaking this rule are not being selfish. They are obeying, carefully and at some inconvenience, a law they know about, while a second rule sits on the books unread. That is not a moral failure. It is a failure of signage, and it started when the signs came down.
Who this is
Some New Yorkers who walk the same sidewalks you do, several of whom have dogs. This is not a campaign group, it has no funding and nothing is for sale. There is no author byline because the argument does not improve by having a name attached to it — the statutes say what they say regardless of who noticed.
It is worth being clear that this is written affectionately. New York dog owners carry bags through winter, at night, in weather nobody would choose, for an animal that will never thank them. The complaint is narrow and specific, and it is about thirty seconds.
How it is put together
Every factual claim carries a source, and statutory text is quoted from the issuing body’s own publication rather than from a summary of it — which turned out to matter, because a good deal of what is written about this online is wrong in the same specific way. The most widely repeated error is that the 1978 pickup requirement is Health Code § 161.03. It is not.[1][3]
If something here is wrong, it should be corrected rather than defended. The Sources page lists everything this site is standing on.
If you want to join in
#curbyourdognyc
There is a loose idea that people might photograph what they find — the place, never the person and never the dog. A grate, a doorway, a tree pit. No faces, no confrontations, no addresses. It is not a campaign and there is nothing to sign up to; it is just a tag, if it is useful to you.
What this is not
This site is a work of commentary. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the City of New York or any of its agencies, and nothing on it is legal advice.
No city seal, agency logo or official signage design is reproduced here. The historical Curb Your Dog and Keep New York Clean signs were designed work — Walter Kacik’s, for the Sanitation Department — and are deliberately not imitated anywhere on this site.[7] Everything you can see was drawn for it.