SCOOP!
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual SCOOP! It must be hard for people under 35 to imagine how large dog mess (as I am constrained to call it) once loomed in the day-to-day life of the nation. Not the metaphorical kind,...
...Clean and green, of course, are not always synonyms...
...To no one’s surprise, the stuff turns out to be even less pleasant when you are holding a hot baggy of it than when you are contemplating it on your neighbor’s lawn...
...The dog-owner’s rationalization is more like a smelly version of the “paradox of the heap” described by the philosopher Eubulides: How many grains of sand do you have to remove from a heap before what remains is a heap no longer...
...Remind me which driveway is yours again...
...They crane around the side of the house, to see if there’s a bin, bucket, or fl ower pot not too embarrassingly far down the driveway...
...But they had a good look around fi rst...
...And just because lawns suddenly became places you could gambol on barefoot did not mean the argument ended...
...You have to get up pretty early to catch a dog-walker in the act...
...The problem was that the law changed dog mess from something dropped at random by dogs into something distributed purposefully by humans...
...Garbage is a funny kind of property...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...People really did make out a lot in public parks in the 1970s...
...Any stroll was an obstacle course...
...Every gesture betrays a bad conscience...
...They approach with the baghand held stiffl y on their hip, like a quarterback on a bootleg...
...Evidence of their freedom steamed on every lawn and sidewalk...
...I mean that only in an olfactory sense, though, and maybe I’m wrong...
...If you surprise them they will say they were admiring your rhododendrons, even if you don’t have rhododendrons...
...The next moment, they’ve gone all furtive...
...One moment, they’re stooping behind Rover with a plastic bag, as the law requires...
...In the hands of rogue politicians, secret police, and common criminals, this is the rationalization for sinister invasions of privacy...
...Rivers, forests, and fi elds could be rescued through the same kind of tidying up that we were enjoined to lavish on our living rooms...
...Au contraire...
...Sometimes they are opposites...
...But on humid summer weekends, when the hum from all the dog mess our neighbors have secreted in our driveway over the past week wafts up to the porch where I’m having lunch, I confess it does strike me that the nature of my garbage has changed...
...Not the metaphorical kind, which retains its privileged position in the fi ne arts and political oratory, but the actual stuff, as dropped by real canines...
...As a nine-year-old racing around with the soundtrack of This Week in Pro Football pulsing in my head, I ended a lot of my imaginary touchdown dives covered in something other than glory...
...With New York State’s landmark Canine Waste Law of 1978, soon imitated across the country, things changed...
...We might even use the toilet less and save on the water bill...
...Casual SCOOP...
...Most families kept something sharp and disposable around the house—like old Popsicle sticks—for scraping shoes clean...
...Would any of them, I wonder, stop the car after a family trip to Popeye’s, and dump all the half-fi nished tubs of coleslaw and red beans, all the dripping drumsticks and stained wet-naps, into your trash can...
...Its owner has renounced his claim to it, but it has neither disappeared nor become the property of somebody else...
...Thirty years ago, dogs did run free...
...Assuming each of the 61 million dogs in the country makes two bathroom trips a day, the main effect of making their owners scoop up after them has been to create the need for 1.5 trillion extra plastic bags...
...So, with Yankee ingenuity, dog-walkers devised a practical solution: heaving the whole mess into someone else’s garbage and forgetting about it...
...They glance up at the windows of the surrounding houses and move towards one that has no lights on...
...Clean and green were synonyms...
...Sometimes they leave their present on top of the trash-can lid, presumably for fear that the sound of opening it might wake someone...
...Reasoning by blockheaded syllogism, authorities asked: Why would you let your dog do anything on the sidewalk that you wouldn’t do on the carpet in front of your TV...
...Maybe if we could get over our scruples about garbage cans being no place for waste, we could strike a real blow for the environment...
...Maybe they would...
...Just as it doesn’t change the nature of a pile of garbage to remove a beat-up toaster, they reason, it won’t change its nature to lob in a few of Fido’s turds...
...Those so-called pooper-scooper laws were conceived as “ecological,” because environmentalism back then was obstinately commonsensical...
Vol. 14 • September 2008 • No. 2
