| Kommentar | Interesting idea, though I'm not sure there's necessarily any direct connection between 'curb' meaning to restrain, as in prevent from biting or jumping, and 'curb' meaning take to the curb, lead to the gutter, which seems to have been the meaning already in the 1930s NYC ordinance, for instance. I don't know when the AE and BE spellings diverged, but many things like that go back roughly as far as Webster.
With the population density and the number of dog owners nowadays, it's true that even gutters might not be a very good solution in a city the size of New York. But it's still significantly better than the sidewalk, and back then it was probably a great improvement. At least in a city like that, the streets are usually cleaned regularly by street-sweeping machines in the small hours. And people don't usually walk in the street the way they do in suburbs, since there are sidewalks and you can step from the curb directly into a vehicle. Presumably even in the 1930s, dog owners used some common sense and didn't choose a spot right in front of a crosswalk or entrance or whatever.
But it's been an interesting evolution over the centuries from the times when people threw all kinds of household waste into the gutter, and gutters (and in fact curbs?) were evidently more or less developed for that purpose.
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