$#*! My Dog Says

You think that's barking you hear at night?  Here's what I hear:

Long gone are the days when I could roam the plains and forests. Long gone even are the days I had run of the farm. Now I and millions more like me are crowded into urban and suburban settings, with hardly anywhere to go — literally. No doggie toilets, no doggie sewage treatment plants.  Either my owner picks up after me, or it washes downhill.  And you know what's downhill from everyone around here?  Puget Sound.  Our big toilet.

The Puget Sound Starts Here campaign has recently released a music video that tries to rap home the point that dog poop doesn't magically disappear.  As someone who spends considerable time in Puget Sound (in the water!) I appreciate everyone who cleans up dog poop.  I really do.  I wish more people did.  

Rhetoric aside, just how big a problem is dog poop?  The assumption is that if it weren't a significant health problem, they wouldn't have made the movie, and groups wouldn't be erecting dog mitt stations all around the region.  

But to get beyond assumptions, I visited ScoopPoop.org, the web site pointed to by the movie.  That site itself didn't have much at all in the way of information, unless I wanted to learn the Dog Doogity Poop Pickup Dance.  It did have a "learn more' link, which pointed to PugetSoundStartsHere.org That web site seemed long on social marketing and short on information.  I clicked on the dog, hoping to learn more about the problem, but all I got was the sentence, "Backyard poop is a big problem."  There is a "resources" page hiding at the bottom that has a long list of links to links, but it seemed little more useful than simply referring me to the library, or to Google.

Well, I'll give the Puget Sound Starts Here campaign some thumbs (or paws) up for calling attention to the dog poop problem and to a few other problems it's pointing fingers at.  But I'll bet they'd make a stronger case if they would  offer some concrete yet digestible information to the public about the issues they're highlighting.