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A Fly-Tipping Dog Has Been Caught by Sicilian Police. Here’s How to Train Your Own

We asked a dog behavior charity how to train an animal for crime.

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A beautiful, viral-ready video that says something unique about the zeitgeist hits our feeds every couple of days. Something of a rarer phenomenon? A fly-tipping dog. This week, however, the two have coalesced.

It probably needn’t even be said: the video is perfect. Posted to the city of Catania’s official Facebook page, we see some miraculously crisp CCTV footage of a small dog (there’s definitely some Jack Russell in there) trotting along a barren road dragging a fairly hefty bag of rubbish. He neatly places it at the roadside, before looking back to see if anyone’s watching him. He’s nervous? Because he’s fly-tipping? Because he knows he’s fly-tipping? Because he knows, somehow, that fly-tipping is illegal, and maybe harbors suspicions as to why that might be the case? He’s a Sicilian Jack Russell with a bout of climate anxiety?

The dog has obviously been trained. Even whomever posted it to Facebook can’t deny that this is, on some level, extremely sick: “Ingenuity can never become an alibi for uncivilization,” reads the caption. They also note that it’s exploitative, calling the fly-tipping “a behavior that tries to escape the rules by taking advantage of the unconscious four-legged friend.”

Fair enough. But is training your dog to fly-tip actually that bad? I called a dog behavior charity’s helpline to find out. Within minutes, I’d invented a dog called........

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