The great poo debate

Ok, I don’t want to blow my own trumpet but I did something mildly heroic today. I picked up someone else’s dog poo. Unlike, Mrs Sinatra – she’s one in a million – this is not something I do on a regular basis. But there’s something about dog poo that ahem, gets under people’s skin.

This particular poo was large and while not steaming was still a bit on the squashy side. It was also on the beach, quite near the stairs and also very close to a bin. It was just waiting for some innocent – possible non-dog owning person – to step in it. 

But exactly why is dog poo considered so gross?

Having got up close and personal with it a lot lately, I admit it smells ten-times worse than human poo. I think it’s the mostly carnivorous diet that makes the poo smell so bad and accounts for the multiple silent-but-deadlys.

But why do we as a society object so strongly to the presence of dog poo in our lives? And why does it create such extreme anger? (see images)

I guess in essence whether to pick up or not to pick up reflects the kind of person you are. Being a dog owner, I’m discovering, is a little like being a smoker. One bad dog owner can let the whole team down. An owner who doesn’t pick up their dog’s poo, who lets their scary dog roam the beach terrorising people, who leaves their dog tied up at home all day so that it barks incessantly – these are the kind of owners who give the rest of us a bad name.

Mrs Sinatra offered me a strategy for dealing with non-poo-picker-upperers. You stop them and politely say ‘Oh, you may not have noticed, your dog did a poo. Here’s a plastic bag...’

This is fine in theory but it assumes that the non-picker-upper is a nice human being or at least vulnerable to being embarrassed into social norms. The fact that they’ve blithely let their dog poo and haven’t given a c**p, would seem to indicate otherwise.  

So, if picking up the odd bit of poo helps keep the non-dog owners on side, I don’t really mind. But it would be nice if those ***** ****** ***** did it themselves.