The Daily Scoop - Poop!

Wags, thanks for bursting everyone's bubble about the Winter Poop Elf. Winter is the best time for cleaning up after your dog. After all, you can find poop so much more easily, even at night. It’s just sitting on top of nature's white frozen snow cone, begging you to pick it up. You can't miss it in my neighborhood during the winter we've been having.

In any event, there is more to dog poop than we think.

When I was a kid in suburbia, we cleaned up dog poop only to be a nice neighbor. It didn’t seem right for our neighbor to inadvertently step in it. There were only a couple of dogs in our neighborhood and anything left on the front lawn could be recognized and traced to your front door. Today, it’s a much bigger environmental problem.

Consider that 2,200 tons of horse manure were plopped out each and every day over the streets of New York in the 19th century. They say that the architecture of the brownstones of NYC, with the entrances on the second floor, reflect the environmental mess outside the door. They were built to distance its owners from the odiferous and unsanitary conditions rising from the horses in the streets below. All this according to Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, authors of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." (See their archived column in the New York Times.)

The answer to this problem? The car, the bus, the subway. End of that environmental problem, beginning of another. . .

It's not quite as bad with dogs, but still a major consideration. According to The Humane Society of the United States, there are approximately 74.8 million owned dogs in the U.S.; 39% of U.S. households own at least one dog. That’s a lot of poop. For most us, cleaning up after our dogs isn't just a nice thing to do for the neighbors, it's the law. But what’s the best way to do this?

There is a whole dog poop industry. You can pay people to go out to your backyard and clean it up for you. For we “do it yourself-ers,” a simple visit to the bricks and mortar or virtual pet store will offer many ways to clean up after Jake and Phoebe. Some are even designed to help the most reluctant, compulsive, hygienic person to do the right thing.

Of course, like many people, Wags will take any old plastic bag that brought something home from the store and transform it into something useful, like a pooper scooper. She’s so creative and practical! As for me, I am so averse to picking up poop that this almost prevented me from bringing a dog home. And when I brought Jake home, for the first couple of weeks, I’d be nearly retching my way down the street holding a bag off to the side.

So, believe me, I definitely don’t want to see or inhale Jake’s creation for any longer than I have to, nor do I want to take a chance that my Wall Street Journal delivery wrapper will have a hole in it in just the wrong place. So, yes, I buy “Bags on Board Refill Bags” for the two plastic holders (in the shape of a red hydrant) that are attached to each of Jake’s leashes. Yes, it seems silly to pay for something you can get for free, but at least it helps me do the job and get over my aversion to picking up the stuff.

Yet, I've become increasingly conscious of our environment and am now really worried that this bag isn’t “green” enough. There are others sold with bigger claims to biodegradability, but I'm not sure if that is anything more than a claim. If you have some solution to this dilemma, let me know.

An intriguing candidate for my backyard is the “Doggie Dooley Pet Waste Disposal System.” They say it’s like a miniature septic tank for dogs. Which leads me to something else I’ve read – that people take the poop home and flush it down the toilet. Ugh! Once I’ve bagged it…well, let’s just say that I didn’t want to see it in the first place.

Sorry for all the scatological talk. It’s just that we have dogs and with it comes this new focus. And, as I’ve always said to Jake, “Just when I think I’ve got you trained...you poop – and I pick it up. So, who has trained whom?”