Dog signs are an ubiquitous part of the semiotic landscape in many parts of the world. This article delves into signs regulating dogs in a small town in Finland.
Image 1: An example of a generic “no dogs allowed” sign
Signs can be iconic, symbolic or indexical. An icon is something that resembles its target, a symbol symbolizes something via learned sociocultural agreements, and an index points to something by e.g. causal or spatial contiguity.
For example, the sign in Image 1 utilizes all of these three types. The black silhouette of a dog is an icon as it resembles a (generic terrier) dog, the red circle with a slash across symbolizes prohibition and the location of the sign indexes the location in the real world where it applies.
A fascinating aspect of dog signs is how they index various sets of dogs. Some dog signs index the concept of all dogs, as in “all dogs are barred from here” while other dog signs index a particular dog, as in “beware of this (dangerous) dog”. Also note how the intent of the poster of a “no dogs allowed” is to keep an area free from any canines, but the dog-walking sign-reader transforms the meaning of this general dog prohibition to specifically indexing their dog(s). On the other hand, someone without a dog might simply ignore such a sign or infer that the area they will enter will be dog free – just as the sign poster intended.
Image 2: An aerial photograph of a typical area of the suburb. Modern houses, farmed fields and nature are in close proximity.
The geocultural context of the signs
The suburb we are interested in is a neighbourhood of about 3,000 residents within the city of Espoo in Finland and is going through (or is finishing the process of) gentrification. The buildings in the suburb are largely row houses and town houses, though there are also a few larger apartment buildings.
In Finland it is common that apartment buildings and other larger housing complexes are governed by a company, somewhat similar to a homeowner association, whose stocks are tied to the apartments themselves. The size of the apartment building or apartment building complex can have a strong effect on communications. The system may feel more like a friendly coalition of neighbors or a large faceless housing institution. This creates a gradient on how top-down or bottom-up the communications from the board of governors feel.
The organization level of most housing communities in this suburb is at the level of maybe a dozen families. In the context of dog signs this idea should be combined with the fact that, except for nearby forests and dog parks, a large part of dog-walking happens near one’s own home. Indeed, the canine signage we observe here is more akin to “friendly reminders among neighbours” than what Halonen & Laihonen describe seeing in Jyväskylä with their 100k+ residents. This observation is further supported by the fact that most of the dog signs were unique, implying that there was no coordinated action of purchasing similar signs by a big actor.
Image 3: Two classical “no dogs allowed” signs fixed on fences. The one on the left has been slightly painted over, which is both a sign of age and of not being considered so important to warrant greater care or cleaning. The one on the right, though not apparent in the image, is quite small and hard to notice also due to faded colors.
We think this communality is also a large factor on why we have very few threatening or even strongly commanding signs here – as noted by Halonen & Laihonen, commands or threats can be damaging to social interactions and with the signs being more easily connected to individuals they might be detrimental to neighborly relations. Instead of a “top-down” or “bottom-up” approach or a private/public/commercial division, we think that here a relevant angle is about the “facelessness” or “anonymity” of the sign. It is easier to “hide” behind a sign if it has been put up by a bigger actor that you are a part of, like the state, than behind a sign that you have clearly put up yourself.
The signs
We have discovered 15 types of dog signs in the suburb. We can’t claim our search to have been exhaustive, but it has been very extensive. Out of the 15 types one had five instances surrounding a housing block and another had three instances on the three gates of a public playground. The rest of the sign types were unique.
Image 4: Two signs showing a clearly altered stance of the dogs due to urination or defecation.
Out of these 15 types 7 were direct “no dog excrements” signs totaling 11 instances out of 21 instances in total. The other signs were divided between signs forbidding dogs, signs reminding to keep dogs on a leash or not letting them out of a gate, a singular sign warning of a dog and then a few signs that had a larger message of which “no dogs” constituted a part. The “no dog excrements” signs were the clear majority of sign types and instances, and furthermore they were the most prominent. The other types of signs we discovered only after having walked past them on several occasions.
Our focus here will be mostly on these “no dog excrements” signs. We’ll discuss the other types of signs only shortly, mostly in how they supplement and contrast the “no dog excrement” signs.
“No dog excrements”
Image 5: A “no dog urination” sign on a fence. The context makes it clear that the fence functions not as the boundary of the prohibition but as the target of the forbidden urination.
Halonen & Laihonen discussed the class of “no dog excrements” in the context of “potential impurity and dirt”. We again refer to their work for more detailed description of this context, but note that with the signs we observed we feel that the question is less of the impurity and behaviour of the dog, and more about reminding the owner about their excrement-related responsibilities. Halonen & Laihonen mention that visually such signs are often similar to “no dogs allowed” signs with an addition that signifies either defecation or urination. However, in many of the examples we’ll see here the whole stance of the dog is usually different and thus helps to emphasize that it is not the whole dog but the excrement that is subject to prohibition.
There are quite strong cultural norms in Finland to collect after your dog, especially outside of forests, but it is not so rare for people to allow their dogs to urinate on fences or other vertical surfaces next to streets. This can cause discoloration, smell or other damage to these surfaces in the long run, even if a single event seems quite harmless. We feel that this aspect of “dogs often urinate on vertical surfaces” slightly alters how we should interpret the placement of these signs. Often fences and gates symbolize (and function as) boundaries between spaces, and a “no dogs allowed” sign placed on a fence tends to mean that it is from within the fenced area that dogs are barred from. But in this setting a “no dog urination” sign on a fence does not mean that the fence is a barrier that limits the effect of the sign to within, but instead is a generic vertical surface that the owner wants to protect from dog urine.
Image 6: Sign whose style is cartoonish rather than realistic or iconic, perhaps aimed to soften the message?
The styles of the signs vary from simple crossed out silhouettes of dogs to more detailed cartoony versions. The most sturdy sign, a metal plaque bolted onto a stone wall, also had the most cartoony and colorful illustration – perhaps this was to reduce the severity of the sign arising from the heavy installation? None of the dog icons used in the signs seemed threatening in any way, nor did they face the viewer or seem to pay them any attention. Their passivity with respect to the sign viewer also seems to emphasize the fact that it is not the dog’s behaviour that is targeted here but that of the dog’s walker.
Textual messages, when used, tended to be very polite. Any text usually employed the Finnish grammatical construction of softening an imperative “Clean after your dog!” to a more questioning “You’ll clean up after your dog, won’t you?”.
Image 7: Two signs with text in them, both using very polite forms of addressing the viewer.
We note that the leftmost sign with text here is the sole dog sign we have seen, in this suburb or elsewhere in Finland, where the collection of dog excrement by an owner is depicted directly.
Other signs
The signs not directly related to dog excrements were much more varied. They ranged from official signage from the city of Espoo, which we think reflects less on the local culture, to clearly self-made notices stapled or taped to whatever surface was convenient.
Besides two examples – one of them a public notice on dog leashing situated on a road leading to a large forest, and a “Beware of an attack dog” sign within a private property – the signs tended to continue the theme of friendly messages between neighbours. This was reflected both in the style, language choices and style of the signs.
Conclusions
Image 8: Example of a miscellaneous sign
Halonen & Laihonen found clear differences on what aspects of the interactions between humans, dogs and properties are restricted in different settings. Compared to their observations in the urban cityscape of Jyväskylä, we feel that in our suburb there is a much stronger emphasis on reminding the dog-owners that they have authority and responsibility regarding their dogs’ behavior.
We furthermore think that there is a considerable effect in play with regards to the level of non-anonymity in these signs – the signs are quite strongly connected to small-ish communities who might not want to jeopardise their neighborly relations by using angry commanding signs.
In future, we hope to extend our work by contrasting the dog signage found here to signage found in some other suburb with differing level of housing communities. Another related question we are interested in is if the amount or style of the dog signs is dependent on their location with respect to “outside visitors”. Is there a noticable difference on roads that e.g. lead to forests or dog parks, thus being used more by people who are not immediate neighbours?
We conclude by agreeing with Halonen and Laihonen about the fact that something like dog-signs that might on the surface seem quite insignificant can reflect interesting things about the local cultural landscape.
References
Halonen, M., & Laihonen, P. (2019). From ‘no dogs here!’ to ‘beware of the dog!’: restricting dog signs as a reflection of social norms. Visual Communication, 20(4), 501-526.
Laihonen, P. (2016). Beware of the dog! Private linguistic landscapes in two ‘Hungarian’ villages in South-West Slovakia. Language Policy, 15(4), 373-391.
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