Anybody who has dogs has to deal with their poop. It doesn’t matter if you live in a sixth floor walkup in New York City, or on seven acres in suburbia (both places I have lived with dogs), you still have to pick up dog poop. In the city nobody has yards so the only place for dogs to go is on the street. There might be a stray tree or a small garden, but generally they crap on the sidewalk. Also there is a very large fine if you are caught without picking it up so all dog owners carry bags, bending over and scraping it off the sidewalk with only a thin layer of plastic separating one’s hand and warm shit. Where I grew up we had a huge lawn so the dogs could go without the humiliation of being on a leash and having a human watching and waiting impatiently for them to finish so they could pick it up. When I was a kid we used a shovel to pick up the poop and threw it over the hedge into the neighbors rhododendron bushes, a terrible habit we copied from our erstwhile father. Now I live in a place where I have a yard so my dogs can go at their leisure, but when we walk them they must be on leashes and we carry bags in case they poop, which happens often.
Training my kids to pick up dog poop was not an easy task. They were six, four, and one year old when we got our first dog here in Seattle, old enough at the top to do chores. I started my boy with a shovel he could barely lift and a paper grocery bag. He would put the bag down on the lawn and use two hands to maneuver the shovel. I used to watch out the window as the bag would crumple on one side and poop would slide off the shovel back onto the lawn. But he got bigger and stronger and better at it, and as his sisters grew they too had to start picking it up. However each one still tries to get out of it, in different ways, and they are now seventeen, fifteen and thirteen years old. My son tries to procrastinate until it’s dark so he can’t see and tells me he’ll do it tomorrow. My middle daughter refuses to comply until I’m yelling, and then is usually mad that I’m mad at her and so does a less than thorough job on purpose. My youngest daughter doesn’t mind chores as much as the other two, or just follows the path of least resistance. She is the third child after all, and doesn’t like conflict, of which there is a copious amount in our family. She would rather get it over with and not have me mad at her. Her brother and sister aren’t as sensitive to my disapproval, or they think it’s worth the trade in order to avoid an unpleasant job.
The same holds true when they walk the dogs. My son thinks he doesn’t have to pick it up if it’s dark, as if just because he can’t see it, nobody else can either, despite the probability of the next day’s light. My middle daughter picks it up, but haphazardly, never tying the bag and then leaving it on the porch when she comes home instead of walking ten steps into the garage and throwing it in the garbage can, driving her father insane with rage. It’s his pet peeve. In fact, he yelled at everybody today because there was a plastic bag of shit left on the back step. My youngest daughter is so conscious of doing the right thing that once she threw a bag of poop in someone else’s garbage can that was out on the street on garbage day, and then felt so guilty about it she went back and fished it out.
My pet peeve (among many) is when my husband or kids step in dog poop and then wash their shoe in the kitchen sink, using utensils we eat with to scrape the poop out, and the kitchen sponge to wipe it off. Or when they don’t let the dogs out before bed or first thing in the morning, either when I’m out of town, or on a rare day when I happen to go to bed early or sleep in, and they crap in the house. My son is excellent about ignoring days old poop a few feet from where he sits playing his xbox in the basement, or a few feet from where he plays piano in the living room, but yells at his sisters for not flushing the toilet when there is just pee in it. I try and point out the hypocritical nature of his reaction, but it falls on deaf ears. They have pet peeves of their own I guess.
The funniest thing happened a few days ago with our cat in relation to poop. My son and I were walking the dogs, and there is one lawn they particularly like for pooping so we stopped to let them do their business. The cat was walking behind us and she stopped too, in the rose bed. I saw her scratching in the dirt so I got my son’s attention and we watched agog as she dug a hole and pooped, as if she and the dogs had scheduled the pit stop. She covered her feces, delicately pushing dirt over it with one paw, and then nonchalantly bounded past us. We don’t have a litter box because she’s an outside cat so I’m not sure we’ve ever seen her poop. “Cats are smart,” my son said, redundantly. “We don’t have to pick it up, do we?” “I don’t know,” I said, “I’ve never had this problem before.”
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