Thoughts on Dog Shit

I’ve been thinking a lot about dog shit these days or, to be more precise, I’ve been thinking about dog shit a lot more than most normal people think about the subject. It’s not that I like to think about dog shit. I’m sure there are people cheerfully obsessed with the topic but I’m not one of them. Then again I don’t know what most people are thinking most of the time anyway. Maybe everyone’s been thinking about dog shit for centuries and I’m finally getting into the act but I doubt it.

I didn’t always spend a hefty chunk of my time thinking about dog poop which probably has something to do with the fact that I haven’t always had dogs. About five years ago that changed when we adopted Tinkles. Tinkles, as you may infer from her name, was something of a challenge to house train. It took about a year and a half to keep her from using the inside of our home as a toilet but, once the issue was resolved she was an absolute delight and a fine addition to our family. We enjoyed her so much, in fact, that a few years later we decided to procure another dog whom I’ve have named The Nibbler.

Getting another dog, and a puppy at that, might not be the dumbest idea I’ve ever had but that’s simply because I’ve had so many other dumb ideas throughout my life. Tinkles had only been house trained for a year when we picked up The Nibbler which is, apparently, the amount of time it takes for me to forget what an ordeal it is to raise a puppy.

Fortunately The Nibbler was much easier to train than Tinkles. After about four months or so he got the idea that defecating in our home wasn’t appropriate but it wasn’t an easy thing. I spent the bulk of that time tethered to The Nibbler to prevent him from having any accidents in the house. We even got a bell for him to ring in the event he was suffering from any intestinal or bladder related urgency. Being a bright little guy The Nibbler quickly realized that any time he wanted to go outside he simply had to ring the bells hanging from the door knob regardless of whether or not he really needed “to go”.

According to my best estimate I spent approximately 98% of my time letting The Nibbler in and out of the house in the hopes that he would poop outside which goes a long way towards explaining my recent fascination with dog shit. On a whim I decided to do some research on the subject and found that the average dog defecates between one and five times a day. If those figures are true then both of my dogs appear to have very robust digestive systems and are on the higher end of the scale…not that I’m counting.

My mind, naturally, went to the next logical question which was “If my dogs produce this much feces then how much crap do all of the dogs in the US produce?

The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. According to one site (flushdoggy.com) the 71 million dogs in the U.S. poop out 29,000 tons of waste each day. I’m not a mathematician but that appears to equal some 10,585,000 tons of dog shit every year which is clearly an amount larger than the average mind can easily conceive. All of this dog shit amounts to about 3.4% of all the waste in landfills which is an easier (but no less horrifying) number to comprehend but one that is clearly a fairly substantial figure and begs a few questions.

The three that come to mind are:

“How long do we have until we’re overrun with dog shit?

“What else can be done with it?” and finally,

“When will our colony on Mars be ready?”

Unfortunately I haven’t found many answers to these questions and the ones that I’ve discovered aren’t entirely satisfactory. One solution for ridding ourselves of the dog shit dilemma involves picking up your dog’s waste with a biodegradable bag and then carrying it back inside your house to flush it down the toilet. This is not, I should mention, an intuitive act given all of the time I’ve spent keeping dog shit out of my house.

Another alternative to dumping our dog shit into landfills is to turn it into paper products. I’m not quite sure how the transformation takes place but, regardless of the process, the final product doesn’t sound all that appealing. Imagine taking the extended family out to a nice picnic and trying to explain to your Great Aunt Martha why the napkins smell just a little bit off?

I’m certain that there are even more ways to deal with the dog shit conundrum by people more forward thinking than myself but, sadly, I don’t have the time or the inclination to search for them. Instead I’ll just hope that, by the time we’re overrun with dog poop, it will be some day far in the future and the problem will be in my grandchildren’s capable hands.

About the Author

derekbremer Prior to his life as a stay at home father Derek spent more than a decade performing public relations and marketing functions for financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter Derek enjoys subjecting the public to his unique take on fatherhood, travel and animal husbandry. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project, HowToBeADad, Red Tricycle, RAZED, HPP and the Anthology "It's Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth.