OUR DOG-POO PROBLEM
What does it tell us about our relationship with nature when our green spaces are covered with dog mess and our trees and hedges are festooned with poo bags? Author Max Porter contemplates how society can clean up its act
Our green spaces are increasingly a dogmess nightmare. Max Porter ponders how society can clean up its act.
Ihave three sons, and I try and get them outside once a day. They complain, or rage, when I suggest a walk. They sulk, they bicker, they tell me they don’t care about fresh air, they want to play Zelda. They don’t want to find five different types of leaves, they want to go home. Sometimes they can be convinced to walk down the canal, or do a longer loop along the river, and at weekends I will take them further afield, for a proper walk.
A lot of the green spaces we visit are old quarries, ex-industrial landscapes turned into nature reserves, carefully managed faux-wild spaces. My children know about conservation, ecological collapse, about inequality and ownership. We talk about these things. I have shared with them my fairly extreme opinions on litterers.
They know a bit about the class system, and privilege, and why the idea of nature and the natural are very complex issues. It’s not just saying hello, or get well soon, to the old ash trees. They are children of the Anthropocene, born after the tipping point. The ‘natural world’ of my childhood no longer exists.
And we do not live in a wilderness. We live in a city, albeit one with countryside around it. They know these are shared, politicised spaces. Part of human’s industrial, social, agricultural or leisure activity. They probably understand this better than I do. I recently said
“Ah, fresh air,” on a walk and my eldest corrected me that actually the air was thick with the raspberry vape smoke of the man 50 yards in front. Yes, we saw a kingfisher, but we also saw LEFT VIRUS HOAX sprayed in huge letters on the bridge. In this way, they learn some truths about man and nature.
But if I’m being honest about our experience of nature in lockdown, only 10% of it is these walks. The other 90% is our daily kick around in the park when the four of us play football for an hour. And, if I’m being honest about the defining characteristic of these Government-sanctioned exercise breaks, if I am speaking truthfully about my children’s experience of nature this year and last, then my subject has to be dog shit.
PEDESTRIAN HAZARDS
We probably encounter half a dozen piles of poo on the five-minute walk to the park. On the pavement outside our house there is usually a pile. The neat little turds can be flicked with a stick. The big wet piles need rain or proper attention. Sometimes these doorstep turds have been stepped in already (pity our predecessor) and then walked along. The children calmly hop about and avoid these piles, and call warnings to each other. My youngest is quite officious and spots a poo from some distance, loudly broadcasting his alerts to us and others. We all tut and complain to each other, about how bad the problem has got. Because the problem, as you will have noticed in your local park, has got really bad.
We arrive at the park and I call ‘poo check’ and the children walk around to identify danger zones. We then decide which goal is least problematic, then we cover the poos with branches or leaves, or if they are firm, or frozen, or dry, we spear them with a stick and bin them. I do quite a lot of passiveaggressive shouting, for the dogwalkers in the park to hear. “Watch out, boys, there is poo everywhere.” “Danger! Huge piles of harmful poo right where you want to play!”
Eventually we start playing, but one of us will step in shit at least once, and the grim ritual begins. Into the longer grass to smear and wipe, sometimes stepping in older hidden piles as we do so. Then we use sticks and puddles to do our best. This is fairly ordinary, it was the same when I was a kid. But my patience is thinner when it gets on hands, on footballs, in the treads of little trainers, on bike wheels. It’s not innocuous stuff, and it smells horrendous.
It takes two seconds to bag a poo. A lot less time than it takes to clean a poopy shoe. That’s why I get so upset. It unleashes my most misanthropic, judgemental tendencies. It turns my daily experience of nature into an
“I do quite a lot of passive-aggressive shouting for dogwalkers to hear”
experience of hating other people, and this makes me sad.
One time, I actually cried. My lowest dog-mess ebb. My son had scooted through a great steaming edifice. It was stuck around the back wheel and mudguard, right in the wheel bearings. He had trodden it into the plastic ridges of the scooter’s deck. I sat by the outdoor tap, flicking the noxious putty out with a toothbrush and I foolishly scraped towards me and the turd splashed into my face. Poo in my eyes, poo in my mouth. I screamed and threw the scooter at the fence. I wept with rage. My own pet or child’s poo, fine. But a stranger’s? I wanted vengeance. I wanted this dog owner in jail. I wept with fury at the invisible enemy, so careless, so selfish.
Then I had a shower, mouthwashed 700 times and calmed down, called the council, and they put up a nice poster on our street saying “there’s no such thing as the dog-poo fairy”. But this year, it’s gone mad. As my son said recently: “There’s more poo than grass, please can we give up and go home?”
MESSED UP
Our parks and green spaces are covered in poo. Plastic bags line the paths, spill from the over-full bins, hang on every tree and hedge. The practice of bagging and leaving, as if there really is a poo fairy who will come along and carry it to the bin. The unthinking barbarity of it as a gesture to the people who share your environment.
In more extreme grumps, I fantasise about zero-tolerance solutions. Huge fines, dog confiscation units, public shaming! But more optimistically, if not realistically, I fantasise about a social experiment; a ‘great national effort’. A little project in training for bigger social projects! If we can fix the poo problem, think what else we could fix! No threats. No violence. No attacks on civil liberties, just a nationwide collaboration to stop something which we all agree – if we are being sensible – is disgusting. But when are we all being sensible?
In bitter grumps, I link the problem to broader sociopolitical issues. I wonder if perhaps the dog-poo crisis is an extension of, a response to, or even a symptom of the various political pickles we’re in. We are all strained. If we’re going to be fined for leaving the house, we may as well risk a dog-poo fine. It’s not as if we’ve got police to spare to enforce these laws. And when politicians break the rules in massive ways then why should I, Mr Tax Paying Normal, be fined for plop on the path?
But this is surely sociopathic, as well as utterly counter-productive. Don’t we want less crap in our lives, not more? Metaphorically and actually? Or does this everyday lack of empathy point to a decaying of the invisible glue that holds a civilized society together? We can’t blame politicians for this, or the notional ‘other’. Our tendency in this fractured age is to think it’s corrupt Etonians’ fault, or readers of that newspaper, or people that live there, but dog ownership does not obey any of these dangerous ready-mades with which the blame game can be steered. From the very posh to the very poor, we all have dogs, and all dogs poo. So we have to fix this ourselves.
Or can we blame the politicians? The troubled relationship between badly funded local councils and archaic national by-laws? In other countries, there are clearer laws, and more bins more regularly emptied. The state makes it easier for the citizen to do the right thing, and the citizen respects the state enough to do it.
We are in this together. Ordinary people. Humans with or without dogs. It isn’t existentially boggling as some of the crises facing us are. It isn’t beyond our control. It might be helpful to cling to the dog-poo mission as a small thing, but one I can do something about. A few calls, some bins, some leaflets. We love a campaign, don’t we? Plastic bags, garden-bird count? Let’s do poo!
When I see that nice lady hanging her little bulging bag on the fence, I’ll say, “Please don’t do that.” And if she says, “How dare you, you self-righteous dogless fool, how dare you tell me how to live!” I’ll politely say that sometimes we have to tell each other how to live, based on shared moral and practical ambitions, on the aims of our community, on lived experience of what is permissible. And if she says, “you pick it up”, I guess I will.
We need to keep picking it up, and addressing the minority of dog-owners who don’t, until the poo is mostly gone. Until the idea of leaving poo on the path is as outrageous an idea as smoking a ciggie on an aeroplane.
We will still all be sharing the park, but sharing it better. It’s about how we treat the planet, and each other, and how they are often the same thing.
And I guess the best thing I can do to teach my kids about the changing relationship between mankind and the planet in this strange and stressed time, is to quit moaning about the turds in the goal, quit shouting passive aggressively at the dog owners, quit extrapolating about whose fault it is and what it means, quit linking it to everything, quit catastrophising, and just quietly bend down and pick it up.
“We are in this together. Ordinary people. Humans with or without dogs”