The Poop Deniers
The state of a nation may be defined by how well it treats its least citizens. Might another measure be how much dog dirt is left on its sidewalks?
In 1978, New York City became the first major U.S. city to put a “pooper-scooper” law in effect. The health ordinance (No. 161.03) reads:
A person who owns, possesses or controls a dog, cat or other animal shall not permit the animal to commit a nuisance on a sidewalk of any public place.
A few years later when I moved there to attend New York University, signs about the law were prominently displayed around town. Having arrived from the Midwest, I was a bit surprised by the ordinance but was somewhat paradoxically confused by what had taken so long, in the way we are with most great ideas.
Oh, yeah. Of course! Why didn’t someone think of this before?
I remember pausing one morning while on a quiet walk in the West Village because I saw someone who might have been a supermodel, well-dressed and in high heels, daintily crouching all that way down to pick up a chunk of feces (nearly the size of my forearm) produced by her Great Dane, who stood panting and grinning while she splendidly, if somewhat awkwardly, did her civic duty. I was so struck by the scene that I attempted to write a poem about it.
Some people still didn’t comply, but as the four years I spent in the city passed I saw less and less of the problem.
I don’t know how unsoiled the sidewalks of Manhattan and the other boroughs are these days, but back in 2005, Freakonomics writers Steven J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt wondered if DNA testing of dog poop, with fines mailed to owners, might help the situation. They noted that while dealing with dog dung was still a problem in the city, it was nothing as bad as in the nineteenth century when some 200,000 horses were moving people and goods around New York City and its streets were encrusted with horse manure.
Out here in suburban St. Louis County, things seem to be getting increasingly poopy. As regular walkers and runners, my wife and I often find ourselves not enjoying our surroundings so much as keeping a close eye on the sidewalk, to short stride or hop awkwardly to avoid canine caca. Recently, I was struck by a simple exhortation, in pink chalk, left by a child on a sidewalk outside a neighborhood on Grant Road:
Pick
Up
Poop!
A bit further on, the kid had circled some smeared leavings and had written Gross!
As one steps over dog dung that someone just left there, one wonders what the motivation might be behind the act (or, rather, non-act). Some instances might, of course, be sidewalk-chalked up to simple forgetfulness (i.e., rushed out with the dog for the morning walk and forgot the bags). But there is just too much of it — often dead center on the sidewalk — for that explanation.
I’ve been reading Bertrand Russell, and he exhorts us to always doubt our premises: “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” So, is the problem really getting worse, or is it just that I am getting older and have less patience for the bad behavior of others? Of course, the measuring of such a phenomenon is an inexact science. In that 2005 article about the sidewalks situation in New York City, the authors wrote that with low fines and few owners ticketed, the real question seemed to be why so many people did pick up after their dogs. As they noted, “This would seem to be a case in which social incentives — the hard glare of a passer-by and the offender’s feelings of guilt — are at least as powerful as financial and legal incentives.”
The Freakonomics authors were thinking along the same lines as did Jane Jacobs, the citizen activist who famously saved Washington Square Park from the predations of Robert Moses and who wrote, in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), about the critical importance to cities and neighborhoods of having “eyes on the street.” In suburbia, we’ve had a surplus of walkers and runners during the pandemic but obviously not enough to make all dog owners behave in a collectivist manner.
One wonders if these scooper scofflaws are the same “citizens” who think masks and vaccines are government overreach. Do they consider even this public-health law a tyranny? My guess is that, yes, they do. The type of person willing to spread human excrement in the U.S. Capitol wouldn’t give a second thought to leaving Spot’s splots in your yard or right there on the sidewalk.
Oddly, some people do go to the trouble to bag the doggie-do but then leave a sad lumpen bag for someone else to dispense with. I would occasionally do this when taking our dog, Bella, for a short run if she had to go early on, but I would put the bag somewhere out of sight and retrieve it when we turned back home. Nowadays, these are often just plopped right on the sidewalk, as if to say, “I’ve done my part; now, it’s up to you.” What is the political mindset here? Liberal-libertarian bipolarism?
Perhaps this could be a new question on one of those quizzes you can take to see where you are politically aligned:
When I walk my dog, I make sure to (a) pick up the poop in a bag and dispose of it at home; (b) bag the poop and leave the bag neatly on the sidewalk; (c) leave the poop and slink away; (d) leave the poop and saunter away, daring anyone to reproach me; (d) retain the poop for my next trip to the Capitol.
One needn’t have read Jane Jacobs to see that the state of our sidewalks reflects the state of our civilization, whether in a city or a town or the suburbs; even the kids with the sidewalk chalk feel the need to speak out.
