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April 23, 2005
Something has been bugging me, lately.
I don't have an awful lot of trouble with Max eating other dogs' shit (or his own, which some apparently do).
The reason I know this is, almost everybody on our block who has a dog, except for us, lets the dog shit in the yard and doesn't bother to go out and pick it up.
Most of these people have children who play in the yard. Do they enjoy cleaning dog shit off their kids?
Since I don't find dog crap in our yard often (now that the old goofball from the next block up who used to walk his miniature poodle without a lead and let it run wild and shit anywhere it wanted, and though he carried a plastic bag in his hand I never once saw him touch a turd), I have to guess that at least nobody's walking their dogs and letting them shit in other people's yards and not picking it up. If they are, they're not doing it at our house. If they're doing it somewhere else, they're breaking the law -- our municipality has rules about that stuff.
Max seldom shits in our yard, so it's not much of an issue to pick up after him here. He usually has to walk about three-quarters of the way around the block before he looses his bowels anyway, so I always take the morning's newspaper bag and pick up the poop in it, and we put the poop in the garbage.
I actually think some people think dog poop is good fertilizer. They're wrong -- commercial dog food largely consists of vitamin-preserved cereal grains and meat protein (which don't decompose very quickly). When's the last time you saw a blanched white dog turd? For me, it's been at least a decade.
This isn't necessarily a bad sign, by the by -- it probably means the dog food they're selling now has a better protein percentage than it used to, and the preservatives they use now are effective. It also means, however, that a dog turd will sit in the grass for a week, or until rain or irrigation dissolves it (or the dog goes back and eats it some time when you're not watching). Dumping preservative-treated grains and meat protein in your yard isn't good for the grass at all. There's nothing in there that's good for your grass, even if the turds did decompose at a faster rate -- meat protein and grain aren't things you'd use to feed a lawn.
There are 'doody composters' you can buy that will turn the crap into compost that could be used on the yard, but if they had those, the turds wouldn't be lying out in the grass six inches from the sidewalk for two or three weeks (or, in the winter, when there's snow on the ground, right smack in the middle of the freakin' sidewalk) like these do.
I don't understand people -- why would you just let the dog shit in your yard and leave it there until it melts? Even if they're only polluting their own yards, what the hell is wrong with somebody who leaves animal feces sprinkled over their lawn all year 'round -- especially when they have little kids? There's all manner of things humans can pick up from contact with animal feces, like roundworms, pinworms, whipworms, amoebic intestinal parasites like coccidia and giardia, bacterial infections like E. Coli... they might as well just smear dog shit on their kids and get it over with.
People are so lazy about this, in fact, that there's a growing business opportunity -- going around and picking up other people's dog shit. I kid you not, go to Google and type in something like 'dog poop' and 'service' and maybe 'lawn' and you'll probably be able to find one in your area, if you look long enough. People actually can't be arsed to pick up their own dogs' shit even when it's five feet from the front door. They would rather pay somebody to go out and pick it up than do it themselves. Tell you what -- good on the first guy who thought of offering that as a service!
Feh. I suppose letting your dogs shit in your own yard still isn't as annoying as letting your cats go off and shit in other people's yards. Ours won't even shit in the run -- I don't even have to clean up after them. I don't see very many cats roaming here, though. There are a couple a block up that I see outside, but they stay on the porch or in the front yard. I suppose running the gauntlet of dog shit is just too disgusting for their delicate sensibilities, I don't know.
Posted by Melinda at 05:01 PM | Comments (1)