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Thursday, June 11, 2009
Walk the Dog, But Don't Pile It On
By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
We are walking, Jim Steeves, his wife and I, along one of those anonymous streets in Albuquerque's Northeast Heights on a June morning bursting with sunshine and possibility.
But Steeves, a 71-year-old retired government employee, has his eyes focused on the ground.
"There's a pile," he announces. "There's another one. There's a dump. There's a big one."
When you put your address in the state's largest newspaper, you tend to get a lot of letters. The one I got from Steeves last week had me at the first line.
"Hi Leslie," he wrote. "Imagine walking into the house and tracking dog poop across the rug because it's on your shoe because someone's dog did a dump on your front lawn and it was dark out there and you neither saw it nor expected to have dog poop on your lawn."
The rest of Steeve's letter was about the particulars of dog poop in Albuquerque, including an estimation that tons of it winds up on streets and yards and that dust from the dried poop is blowing in our breezes.
Imagine that, indeed.
One thing led to another, and soon Steeves and I had laced up our walking shoes and were venturing into the belly of the dog doo beast, a residential street outside a subdivision.
We stroll along in the sunshine and see pile after pile. Steeves says this is actually a relatively clean showing because the poop is all on the gravel side, not on the sidewalk where we're walking.
Although he especially hates to find it on his shoes, Steeves said it doesn't matter where the poop is. "We're all breathing this," he says.
Dog poop has never been high on my Bothersome List, but our walk makes me wonder. Are we really reeling in bacteria-laden canine refuse?
Jay Evans, who oversees Albuquerque parks and trails, offers an answer. "It's a chronic problem," he says. "The management of dog manure is an enormous challenge in any municipality."
Consider these numbers. Eighty thousands dogs are registered in Albuquerque. Those dogs produce 20 tons of waste a day. It's gotta go somewhere.
A lot of it goes into the landfill or to the sewage plant as homeowners clean up their yards and dutifully pop open their trash cans or toilet seats. But much of it winds up on the sidewalk, the street, in parks and on walking trails.
Is that really a problem, besides the yuck factor of it ending up on the bottom of your shoe?
According to the city of Albuquerque, there are possible health and environmental dangers, and those are the scenarios that drive Jim Steeves to write a letter and prompt governments to make it a crime to leave poop on the street. (Yes, it's actually illegal in the city and Bernalillo County to allow your dog to go to the bathroom on property that is not your own and not pick up the dump.)
Let's say my dog Daisy (perfectly hypothetical in this regard) squats on a sidewalk and makes a deposit and I, her walker, fail to make a withdrawal. Don't tell sweet Daisy, but her waste may contain, in addition to processed dog chow, icky bacteria.
Then it rains like it has this week. The waste washes into the storm drain and into the big ditch and then into the river. There, it can't act like fertilizer the way it could on a lawn. It begins to decay and uses oxygen that is meant for the things that are supposed to live in the river.
Or, this being New Mexico, it doesn't rain. The poop just sits there and smells and eventually decays and, yes, blows away.
As Steeves and I stroll up a busy walking path in another neighborhood in the Heights, we see plenty of poop along the shoulder and plenty of cheery dog walkers who do not appear prepared to comply with the law.
Then we spot the rarest of Albuquerque species: Homo canid baggus. Francesco Sarno is walking his chow, Mandy, and carrying a plastic bag to collect her business.
Sarno, a charming native of Rome who now lives in Albuquerque, is a happy bagger.
"I use it every time," he says. "We live on this lane, and we want to keep it clean."
Steeves says bravo to that, but knows most people don't just do the right thing. They need prodding. He suggests a much stiffer license fee for owning a pet, a stiffer penalty for leaving poop on the ground and a tax on pet food to pay for the cleanup.
I've spread out my Tarot cards, and I predict none of those things will happen.
The city has placed bagging stations at most city parks to encourage pickup and is making efforts to get them on walking trails. Evans says the greatest motivation to pick up after your dog should be "common courtesy and humanity."
"I wish the better angels of our nature would kick in," he says.
So, enjoy your walks, folks. Remember your humanity. And watch where you step.
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com.
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