Monday, August 15, 2005

The Shitty End of the Stick

(WARNING! This post contains an excessive amount of references to, and mentions of, poopie.)

I could never be a dog owner again.

Sure I loved my faithful K-9 buddies while I was growing up as a child, but in my later years as an adult I have definitely morphed into more of a cat person. I don’t mind the seeing and petting of other peoples pet dogs but I don’t think I will ever actually own one myself again. I think the pet tide invariably switched in favor of the felines in my life when it became expected that you also clean up the fecal souvenirs left behind your beloved pet whenever it takes a dump while out for a walk.

That’s just plain gross! Hommie don’t play that.

I can remember back as a kid dogs were great. Nobody cared where your dog crapped (except the inevitable reclusive widower who always lived on the corner) and no one ever expected you to pick up it's shit afterwards. In fact, it was an honor to have a neighborhood dog shit on your lawn, or even better still, to ever happen to step square in a freshly laid pile of dog shit. It was considered lucky in the same way as that of having a seagull shit on your head. I don’t purport to understand the logic behind it exactly, but it was there, prevalent, and accepted by everyone.

Dogs would run around dropping turds wherever they pleased and nobody ever seemed to give a shit (so to speak). It was good then to be a dog owner. But then somewhere along the way, that mutual acceptance and respect for dog shit subsided and took an unexpected turn, and somehow, a new whole anti-dog shit culture emerged. All of sudden it became necessary to be mindful of where your dog did it’s personal bid‘ness and also be responsible for it’s immediate removal. Man, one dog I had as a kid had the nastiest smelling shits that ever left a dog’s asshole. If at that time it would have ever been required to scoop his poop afterwards, I would have had to have been a certified member of the Atomic Regulatory Taskforce in order to have a chance at survival.

Not a fucking chance!

I’m just not willing to expend that kind of ownership responsibilities over another living, and shitting, creature - at least not in public anyways. I think witnessing dog owners scooping up and handling their pets turds like they were warm chestnuts makes me want to hurl. It’s not very dignified is it?

How cool can you really be when you’re in up to the elbow in a plastic bag and shoveling up dog shit like a sucker! And just knowing some of these little furry shit factories, you’d be bending over more times than a homeless man picking up cigarette butts at a tailgate party by the time you’ve made it just around the block. Likewise, who wants to be seen swinging a bag of shit while they’re walking down the street? It’s hard enough as it is to accessorize without having to worry about your bag of dog crap as well.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that there is some degree of servitude owed to cat owners as well in regards to the cleaning out their kitty litter boxes. But what happens in the privacy of your own home is just between buddies - cat and cat owner. You’re not outside in public in front of God and all your neighbors like some schlep.

There’s just no fucking way!

If I were a dog owner, the first trick I’d teach it would be how to pick up after themselves. Forget the ‘ol “sit”, “roll over”, and “play dead” standards – that’s all well and dandy of course, but it’s gets old pretty fucking fast. If dogs are really mans best friend, let them prove it by taking care of their basic bodily functions their own-damn-selves. Or even better yet, teach the dog to just shit in zip-lock baggie’s and lug them home for you instead.

Now THAT’S a trick worthy of praise!

How did this modern “Shitphobia” get started? Suddenly everybody is totally shit obsessed. Even when I left my apartment this morning there was a business flyer in my mailbox for, I guess, the latest neighborhood entrepreneurialship – ‘A&A Pet Waste Removal’. Wow! And I thought my job was shitty.

Here’s a company willing to employ people to make regular visits to your yard in order to remove all of those left “canine calling cards”. The long and short of it, or at least the steaming and mooshy, is that they come around to pick up your pets shit for you. That sounds just marginally more rewarding than the job that I am currently holding down since they can more accurately quantify the amount of shit that they actually deal with.

I understand that everybody wants a clean shit-free yard these days, but if someone legitimately wants and loves their pet so much, then they should be contractually obligated to not be so lazy and clean up after it themselves. Calling a professional poop-scooper? That’s just cheating as a pet owner!

This company brochure also goes so far as to detail the benefits for both yourself and for your pet, which both seem to revolve around the spread of salmonella *, giordia, roundworms, hookworms, pinworms, and numerous other diseases that can be spread with lingering left around dog shit, or by the rodents who may be feeding on this accumulated nest-egg of feces. You know, that’s more than I ever wanted to fucking know about, or needed to know about shit before 8:00AM.

Also interesting to note is that this company charges per dog, not per shit (as I would have expected). So the actual quantity of shit being produced is irrelevant as long as it all comes from the same beast? At $10 dollars a pet, that’s quite a bargain! At those rates I could save on my own monthly water bill and toilet paper expenses by hiring ‘A&A Pet Waste Removal’ and resort to simply shitting in my front yard and then dragging my ass along the lawn instead!

No sir! There are some things that I just won't do. I am too far up on the food chain to ever allow myself to handle another lower lifeforms fecal matter. Well, not unless it can be easily separated from the granular litter with a special purple vibrating pooper-scooper that is.

* Now all these diseases I can understand the need for – but SALMONELLA? Who the fuck is actually eating the shit? God I hope they’re referring to the animal in question! And if that’s the case, I say whatever befalls a creature too stupid to realize that eating it’s own feces is a bad idea deserves whatever becomes of it. Period!

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