Dog Poo!

I have three dogs that I walk each day.  Marco "El Pollo" Polo, a found shepherd and doberman mix, weighs 106 pounds, and his two friends, Zoot! and Fat Cow weigh 35 and 45 pounds respectively.  As a citizen, I go to great efforts to pick up after them when they visit a neighbor's yard on the walk.  It has become quite a process.

You'd think this was pretty straight forward a chore.  No.  As a tightwad, I refuse to use more than one bag per trip if I can help it.  And, I want my neighbors to know that I am acting responsibly to keep dog poop off their feet, out of their yards, and out of the groundwater.  So, each day I start out with bags and chalk and dogs and set off on one of several routes around my neighborhood.

I have discovered several things about the technique and have worked hard to develop my Kung Poo (with apologies to the martial arts).  At the first squat, I prepare a bag.  First, my hand goes inside so the bag itself serves as a glove.  I pick up the pile, or in Zoot!'s case, piles, and turn the bag inside out, careful to keep the poop away from the top edges of the bag.  It is warm, yes, it is soft, yes, it is stinks, yes, so I twist the bag closed and bend its neck around the fingers of whichever hand can take it in my juggling of three leashes.  But wait, there's more!  With a bit of chalk, on the sidewalk, I draw a heart and put in the initials of whoever was the author of this incident, then carry the bag along to the next stop.

It gets a little tricky if everyone goes, especially Marco, and sometimes I wish I could just let go and use more bags.  But what are ya gonna do; don't we all have an obsession or two?