This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Dog Poop Ecology

You are walking, or hiking, or biking on Mt. Tam. Perhaps you are alone, perhaps you are sharing the time with family and friends. All around you, the mountain comes to life. Redwoods creak and sway above you, the manzanita scrub swishes in a gentle breeze, oak-shaded huckleberry thickets bloom in the dappled light of the June sun, and majestic flora abounds around you on all sides. The noise of cars and the general chaos of humanity ebbs away and you are immersed in the tranquil solace of wildness.

This is what you came here for. This pristine wildness, this peace, this absence of human affairs.

Then you see it, blooming from the side of the trail, a blossom of garish plastic. Its interior is hidden, but not unknown. Perhaps it is wrapped in a blue New York Times baggie, or a vivid pink one. Perhaps it is pathetically camouflaged in a forest-green baggie. But one thing is clear. It is a bag of dog excrement, knotted and sealed, orphaned beside the wild trail. And you think to yourself, "This is not a native species."  

Although it may bear the same hue as the forget-me-nots or the Indian paintbrush wildflowers, this is no plant. This is a bag of dog excrement, immortalized within a bouquet of plastic trash, preserved for posterity beside this beautiful trail."

Some baggies are fresh, with their neat knots still perking upright. Some baggies are drooping or even flattened, bearing the footprint of an unsuspecting jogger or the tire tread marks of a mountain bike. And some baggies are ancient. They percolate with the condensation and liquifying of gradual decomposition, or maybe burst at the seams a bit.

You attempt to imagine the rationalizing process that led to this abandoned bag of crap sitting beside the trail. Perhaps the well-intending dog-owner meant to pick up this putrid package on their way back to the car. Perhaps they left the poop bag with the assumption that some beneficent, county-employed forest janitor periodically traverses the entire mountain and collects these little Christmas presents for pay. Or, perhaps, this was an act of malicious and calculated negligence by a dog owner who willfully refused to acknowledge that their domestic pet's excretions were their responsibility, but through some perverse sense of "goodness" bagged the feces anyway, took a glance around for witnesses, and left the package with no intention of retrieving it. Regardless, if well-intending dog owners that retrieve the packages, or forest janitors that selflessly collect this waste exist at all, they exist in the minority. These crap bags spring up year-round with the frequency of trailside flora.

Dog-owners are the masters of their pets. Their dog's feces are, in essence, their own feces. The logical equivalent of this bagged poop abandonment is the dog-owner dropping trow and stooping to defecate on a public trail, wrapping their hot pile of waste in a bag, and walking away with no intention to return.

Sweep the excrement off to the side of the trail, where it will decompose naturally as all forest waste will do, or take it to a proper waste receptacle. Leaving plastic-wrapped crap in our pristine, protected land is a pathological practice that embodies the most egregious forfeiture of accountability that is so common to our species. This phenomenon is a metaphor for the social and ecological irresponsibility that plagues our society.  

It is as pathological as it is pathetic. And it needs to stop.

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