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.
