Sidewalk Talk

Dog poop. Let’s talk about it.

I’m not a dog owner but consider myself a dog lover. I don’t have the disposable income or the sense of responsibility necessary to be a good pet owner. I know this. However, I like to think that were I one day to own a pet, I’d be a conscientious pet owner. And so I have a bone to pick with non-conscientious pet owners, specifically, those that don’t pick up after their dogs.

I’ve spoken of it before. I recognize that picking up your dog’s poop is a gross chore. There’s a reason why someone invented the toilet and that we humans don’t just poop on the floor, grab it with a plastic grocery bag, and then throw it in the trashcan. That’s disgusting.

While I can understand why people wouldn’t want to pick up after their dogs, I still find it detestable when they don’t own up to their responsibility. Recently I’ve started to notice a particularly concerning trend in dog doo cleanup practices: abandoned poop baggies on the sidewalk.

More and more, I’ve been encountering plastic bags of poop left lying on the sidewalk, seemingly in the exact spot where the dog deposited the poop initially. Why? Why did you do that, dog owner? To my mind, once you’ve bagged the poop, the most odious part of the task, palming the poop and putting it in a bag, is complete. So I don’t understand how it was too gross for you, the dog owner, to then walk with the bag of poop a block until you found a trash can. Chances are, at one point in his life, your dog has licked his own private parts and then immediately licked you. That’s also gross but you seem to deal with it. Yet this is where you draw the line; holding onto a bag of your dog’s poop for a few blocks? Seems to me that if you’re going to leave the poop bag there, there’s really no reason to even go through the effort of bagging it. It’s like horrible smelling cabs that have air fresheners, except the air fresheners also smell horrible. Why bother?

I don’t think what I expect of dog owners is extreme. I once saw a woman intercepting her dog's poop before it hit the ground. She had her plastic bag in hand hovering below her dog’s butt to catch the poop as it came out. Absolutely disgusting. I don’t expect that level of attention. In fact, I don’t trust that level of commitment to a dog.

But I do expect dog owners to pick up their dog’s poop and then deposit that picked up poop in a trash can somewhere. Is that so much to ask?