Category: Stuff

I am my dog’s personal turd burglar.

Most nights I take Butter, the dog, for a walk around our neighborhood.  It’s good for her and it’s good for me.  As a responsible citizen I clean up after her.  I wouldn’t want to step in another dog’s waste, after all, so I don’t inflict it on my neighbors.  I wish everyone else were so considerate —  most are, not all, but that’s a different topic.

Butter isn’t very regular.  Some days she craps three or four times in the span of our walk (about 45 minutes to an hour), other days there’s not a single bowel movement.  If I could choose which days would be more feculent I would pick garbage night so that I wouldn’t have to carry the bags very far, but I don’t get to choose so sometimes I wind up carrying around a lot of purloined stool.

She pees a lot too, but that seems to go alright because I don’t hassle her about where she makes water and I certainly don’t go back for it.  But her manure is fair game for pilfering, and it’s mine, all mine.

I think Butter has a vague idea that we do our business in the bathroom instead of outside.  I find the dichotomy interesting, actually: a dog’s bathroom is outside, in the open.  If a person made them defecate and urinate inside their house, and other people found out, that person would be considered weird (and probably a bit filthy) and no one would want to go visiting at their home.  The flip side of that coin is, if I am caught soiling the ground outside I could be arrested for disorderly conduct and possibly charged with other offences — even if I do it in the bushes and offer to scoop everything into this nice little baggy I brought with me.

When it comes time to make doody I imagine Butter’s internal monologue goes something like this:

“uhh… hold on… ohohohoh uungh… ahhhhhhhhhhhh

“oh I feel better, time to kick it away and clean up —

“why is he yelling at me to stop?  Doesn’t he like clean —

“ugh no he’s fiddling with the rustling things again.  He’s going to —

“oh gawd yeah he’s picking it up again.  Why do you have to make it weird?

“dude.”  Looks at me reproachfully.  “If I drop a deuce in the house you yell at me.  I do it out here and you insist on bringing it all the way home with us.  What’s up with that?

…

“gawdammit everywhere I sniff it smells like my poop now.  How can we search for everyone else’s scat if all I smell is my own?

“You’re a moron, did you know that mister?”

And so it goes.  From her perspective I stalk her in order to plunder her excrement and keep it for myself.  I think I confuse her a little, but not too much because she’s not that smart.

Humans, on the other hand, supposedly are smart.  We recognize that dogs are a paradox.

She might be the smart one, though.  After all, she gets free room and board, and a personal turd burglar.