Today is National Dog Fighting Awareness Day, a day designated by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to bring awareness to the horrors of dog fighting and to help end the cruelty.
Sampson, Delilah and I support the ASPCA’s efforts to end the horror of dog fighting. We hope you will too.
The ASPCA has a number of ways you can help stop the cruelty. To find out how, click HERE.
Heads up, rant ahead.
Sometimes I feel all I do is bitch about other dog owners. I’ve come to the conclusion that the people in my neighborhood are the most clueless dog people I know.
Like for real, there’s the people across the street whose three bull dogs live on their deck. They are always out on that deck, when I walk Sampson and Delilah at 6:00 AM they are out. When I walk them at 2:00 PM they are out. When I walk at 6:00 PM they are out. When I say the dogs live on the deck, I kid you not. Once a week the guy goes out and shovels the shit off his deck.
Then there’s the people in the house behind them. I hear their dog yipping sometimes at 11:00 at night. I’ve walked by that house and they have a crate under their deck. The yard is not fenced, nor do I see a sign for an E-fence, I have no idea whether they put the dog in the crate at night or not.
Then of course there are the people who ‘walk’ their dogs. Friday morning I’m walking up my street in the dark and see a person in a reflective vest at the street crossing. I see this person start heading away from the area I’m walking and think, whew, I’m off the hook.
Nope, they turn around and I see something very small, very fast with red flashing lights on it. It’s 6:25 in the morning and my sleep deprived brain says, “Is that a remote car? WTF is someone doing with a remote car this early in the morning?” Then I realize it’s a very small dog on a flexi-leash.
I pull the dogs off the road into someone’s driveway and start feeding them treats, as this person continues to walk down the middle of the street with the dog zigging and zagging from one side of the road to the other. As she gets closer I say, “Could you move to the other side of the street!” Meanwhile my dogs start straining to see the other dog, and the other dog starts barking so naturally Delilah lunges.
I think to myself, how can one person be so clueless?
Then Saturday I decide to take my dogs up to the field. Sampson wanted to sniff out one of the trails we haven’t been on since his injury, and I indulged him. As we headed back up the trail into the field I noticed people there with at least one dog playing frisbee. I circumvented the field and walked through the trails.
As we hit the trail leading out I debated heading back towards the field or taking a different path. I had a decent view of the field and approached cautiously. There were people there with dogs and the dogs were off-leash, but they were heading away from the way I was, so I kept going.
Just as we got to our turn, here comes a dog. I have my two and I’m trying to get them away, but this dog keeps coming. I shout, “Get your dog, Get your dog, Get your fucking dog!”
This guy comes running, “He’s friendly, it’s okay. Relax, it’s okay. He’s friendly.”
“Mine might not be,” I said.
Then as his dog continues at my dogs, I dropped the leash,
The dogs all sniff each other, “See, it’s okay,” he says.
“It’s not okay” I said calling Sampson and Delilah and walking away, fuming all the way home.
I’m not trying to criticize you, but you do get a bit hysterical at times.
Maybe I should just stop walking my dogs.
Or maybe I should move somewhere and buy a large piece of land where I can walk my dogs without encountering anyone.
Rant over.
How are you about picking up poop? Here’s my truth. I don’t pick it up in the yard.
I know. I know, it’s bad and I’m not going to make excuses except to say that my yard is big and it’s woody and brushy and dog poop likes to play hide and seek there.
We’re working on getting some trees down and bushes trimmed and hopefully all the leaves and ground cover picked up, then we will start working on one area of the yard for the dogs to poop in, which should make cleaning up easier.
Until then, well let’s just say we’ll tiptoe through the tulips when we walk up there. But siriusly, when I do find poops when I’m working up there, I pick them up.
When we go out for daily hikes I have my trusty poop bags clipped to my pants. I’m frugal, sometimes I pick up two or three poops in one bag. Because I roll that way. Other days, I tie the bags together to form the dog walker’s Chinese Star. And I always pick up the poop, unless Sampson goes so far in the brush that I’d have to Army Crawl to get to it, and then I leave it.
Sue me.
But SOME of the people who walk in our park can’t be bothered to pick up after their dogs. EVER.
The town even put up a poop station and a bunch of signs explaining WHY people should be cleaning up after their dogs.
Yeah, I thought that was overkill myself. (The signs mysteriously disappeared a week or so later.)
Now I don’t mind picking up my dog’s poop. They eat raw and trust me when the people who know poop tell you raw poop is different than kibble poop, well they aren’t just talking shit. They know their shit.
My dog’s poops are hard, in fact sometimes it looks like their pooping sand, that’s how hard their poops are. Don’t worry, they aren’t straining to go, I keep a careful eye on that, but they are hard. Whenever I get a Mr. Softy in there, I know someone has been eating something they shouldn’t.
My point is I have no problem picking up my dog’s nice, hard poop, but for some reason some other dog’s cold, squishy doo just makes me want to puke.
Saturday I walk into the park and what’s the first thing I see?
Yup! Somebody’s dog cranked a steamer right next to the poop station. Sirisuly, how much lazier could you be? If you were any closer your dog would have crapped in the container, but somehow you couldn’t manage to pick it up?
I wanted to put up a sign that said, “Hey shit for brains, you left your brains here,” but I didn’t have any paper.
Our entire walk I thought about that poop, and how horrible it was for these ass kabobs to be sitting there right next to the poop station. I knew I had to pick up the poop but I was gagging a little just thinking about it.
By the time we finished our walk, I had a plan. I put the dogs in the car and opened the window in the hatch, so they could stick their heads out to see what I was doing. **Note to self, next time you take the car in for service tell the dealer that those hydraulics on the window don’t work.**
I grabbed a couple of poop bags from the station and set one on the ground next to the colon cannonballs and using a stick rolled those keister cakes onto the bag.
I folded the bag around the toxic turds and using another bag, I picked it up. It was so much easier than picking up the soft and squishy park sausage with only one bag.
After I’d disposed of the shitsicles, I thought, I’d really love to know whose dog is doing this so I could gather all the park poop and dump it on their lawn. Isn’t that awful? Or maybe fill paper bags with it on Halloween and light it on fire on their front steps.
Well of course that idea is gone now since I put it on the internet, they’ll know who to look to should flaming bags of poo start appearing in my neighborhood.
Sirisuly though, there has to be a way to get through to people. Do you have any thoughts or ideas? Sugar does.
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