This is about dog shit.
Dog shit and antisocial behaviour.
I am a dog person. I live in an inner suburb of Australia’s biggest city with two medium-sized canines and several people.
The dogs bring unspeakable joy and love (so do the people but this is not about them). They (the dogs) also make lots of shit (as I say, this is not about the people). Part of living with the dogs is cleaning up after them. I sometimes feel as though we go through more biodegradable nappy bags picking up after the dogs in a year than we have in 36 years of children and grandchildren. It’s a small price.
I understand not everybody likes dogs. Some fear them. Others are allergic. Think they should not be kept in cities or share public spaces. That they make too much shit. But society is about coexistence, tolerance, compromise, acceptance – and responsibility.
That is why dog people who don’t do dog shit properly are bad for the team.
Here’s one example of it done very badly. The other day, when walking my urban cattle-cross-sheepdog (the older lab was having a lie-in) I turned into the top of my street for the home stretch. A woman in front of me who I’d not previously seen in the ’hood had her labradoodle on a lead. She stopped in front of a house perhaps 50 metres from mine.
She was bagging the poo her dog had just laid on the nature strip in a blue plastic bag. Because her back was to me she had not seen me when she tied the bag up and promptly tossed it over the low front fence on to the middle of the front lawn of the house she’d halted in front of.
Her dog saw mine and growled. This prompted her to turn around and observe me. I suspect I was open-mouthed, dumbstruck. The woman regarded me directly. She shrugged. I said something like, “I really think that’s a pretty shit thing to do,” or, “We don’t do that around here,” or, “For fuck’s sake.” Maybe I said all this. I can’t recall. I was so shocked.
She turned nonchalantly and walked on. I had a decision to make: should I open the front gate of the neighbour’s (I don’t know them – they have just moved in although the house is owned by an old friend) and walk on to their neatly clipped lawn to retrieve the blue plastic bag containing the shit of the stranger’s dog? This definitely felt like a Larry David moment. What if, as I was retrieving it, the neighbours came out and mistakenly thought I was actually depositing a blue plastic bag of dog shit in the middle of their yard?
I did nothing, kind of shocked at what I’d witnessed and pondering the harm the woman’s act might have caused the reputation of neighbourhood four-legs owners, most of whom I know by their animals’ (though rarely their own) names.
Dog shit etiquette is a thing.
Always bag it. If you forget or run out of bags, another dog person will always gladly give you one (everyone has been caught short and understands the embarrassment). Most parks, off-leash or not, will have free bags by the bin. Then you must put it in the public bin. Or take it home.
Depositing it in somebody’s council rubbish bin on the street is a massive no-no unless, perhaps, it’s a collection day and you put it on the very top. I’m agnostic on this, though I have been almightily pissed off to find someone has dumped their dog’s bagged shit in my just-emptied bin where it has then had to fester at the bottom for another week until collection day. When my own rubbish goes on top of it the bag has split with truly grizzly odorous and other consequences (try scraping clean the bottom of that bin after a week in the Sydney summer sun and humidity).
What’s worse, though, are those who actually do go to the effort of picking up their dogs’ doings only to concoct novel ways to dispose of their little bags of shit. Like the antisocial woman with the labradoodle. Or the person who ties the bag on to a low-hanging branch of a street tree (disturbingly common) or leaves it on a car bonnet or on top of – or in – letterboxes. I’ve also seen full bags of dog poo tied to kids’ play equipment in the park and to fence palings. I’ve occasionally seen them left on the sea wall of the small, off-leash beach near me – right next to the bin.
This I find more deeply weird for all of its implications of premeditation and bold defiance of societal expectation, than just leaving the dog’s shit where it was deposited alfresco. Is it, I wonder, some sort of anarchic anti-authoritarian message of protest?
Or might I be overthinking this?
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
