I write in response to the recent letter about dog fouling in Budleigh Salterton and the call for a complete dog ban. Firstly, I fully sympathise with the writer s anxiety about her children coming into contact with dog mess while they are walking and pla

I write in response to the recent letter about dog fouling in Budleigh Salterton and the call for a complete dog ban.Firstly, I fully sympathise with the writer's anxiety about her children coming into contact with dog mess while they are walking and playing. However, as a responsible dog owner myself, who gets just as angry as she does to see fouling around, I can assure her the solution really needs to be practical and pragmatic, not emotional and based on an unachievable ambition.Secondly, I think she will find that every town suffers the same scourge, because, let's say, 20 per cent of dog owners do not care about anyone, or anything else, other than themselves.So therefore, in my view, the only way to deal with the problem for any local council (and only they have the authority to act) is for them to just accept that it is going to happen and put into place a regular (daily) clean-up operation.This could be an employee, funded perhaps from car parking receipts, or maybe could be a useful pastime for youths on Community Service sentences (or maybe it's against their human rights).Sadly, most councils focus (and waste) their resources on empty warnings and threats, rather than accept the sad, but inevitable, truth and get on and deal with the problem effectively.I have tried verbally intervening when witnessing dog fouling, only to be greeted with abuse and even occasional threats.I just hope someone in authority reads this letter and considers the implementation of a more practical and direct approach to mitigating the problem that is a scourge on all of us.Budleigh is a beautiful place and, if necessary, the council should bite the bullet and make the reasonably small outlay required to help keep it that way.David Boden, Budleigh Salterton.