Monday
March 26th.
De Faecibus Canorum
I take as my
text today the report from the Guardian of February 2009, entitled ‘Dog Poo
Britain’.
Six months ago,
Herself and I moved house, from Blackburn, West Lothian, hometown of Subo, to
the village where Herself grew up; indeed, to the house where she grew up. This
is a quiet little bungalow, walled in its own garden, at the end of a quiet
residential area, and on the very rim of the countryside. Walk out of the front
gate, turn to the right, and five paces takes you into fields and trees along a
quiet country road that leads up a hill. The view from the eminence at the top
of this hill is panoramic and beautiful. The people in the residential area are
quiet and neighbourly. We both like peace and quiet. We both love living here.
A little lane runs down the side of the garden
wall to playing fields, and a footpath to the village’s main street shops.
There are football pitches, walks, nurseries and a kiddies’ playground at the
bottom of the lane. In the evening, all is calm and serene. The only people you
are liable to see are people walking their dogs. Lots of people walking lots of
dogs, in the course of the day. It is evidently a favourite walk to bring Fido
up the quiet little street and round our wall, down the lane to the playing
fields.
And this is where the idyll starts
to stink a little bit. All those dogs do what dogs do. And they do it on the
streets and on the playing fields. Despite the fact that every second lamp-post
has a bin attached to it so that dog owners can ‘bag and bin’ their dog’s mess,
thereby rendering the environment a little less unpleasant, hardly any of them
do it. (Indeed, one bin has been graffitied with the legend, ‘Ha! I wrote on
this shit-bin. Take that, Society!’) It’s the only use the bin has been put to,
so far as I can see. The Guardian article that I quoted at the start of this
piece tells me that, in the year 2008 there were 7.3 MILLION dogs in the UK,
depositing 1000 TONNES of dog-poo on the streets, paths and parks of our fair
and fragrant land EVERY DAY. A thousand tonnes is equal to 2,205,000 (TWO
MILLION, TWO HUNDRED AND FIVE THOUSAND) lbs imperial. That’s a whole load of
steaming, stinking, sticky, dangerous poo in anybody’s ready reckoner. Per day,
mind. Per day.
Actually, let’s just drop the word ‘poo’ shall
we? It hinders the argument. It’s twee baby talk. A nyah-nyah, niminy piminy
euphemism. What we are actually talking about here is SHIT. Shite. Turds. Faeces.
Revolting, isn’t it? Imagine if human beings were dropping their knickers and
depositing over two million stones of shite on to the countryside every day.
There’d be an outcry. Justifiably. Redfaced
old colonels would be writing to the Times. There’d be talk of The Great Stink,
and where is the modern-day Bazalgette? So why do we tolerate Mr Selfish
allowing his mutt to void its bowel on the pavement or the park and not do
anything about it?
Because
we are a nation of dog-lovers, that’s why. Poochy poo can do anything he likes.
Even shite on the street. It’s not the dogs’ fault. I don’t suppose. Though if
the stupid animals weren’t there, it couldn’t happen. (Cards on the table here
– surprise, surprise, I’m not a dog
lover. I wouldn’t harm any animal – or not many – but dogs bore me. They bark
and they bite. And they shite.) But, I could forgive the dogs. It’s the
selfish, arrogant, inconsiderate illbred spawn of whores - the dog-owners - that
are to blame. If you want to own a woofing, snarling, biting creature, okay.
But with that comes responsibilities. And one of the major ones is to clean up
after the furry shit-machine.
I
can’t imagine it’s pleasant, lifting a hot dog shit in a plastic bag and
carrying it to a shit-bin. But if you don’t want that unpleasantness, don’t
have a fucking dog. Twice this week, I’ve toted buckets of water from the house
to wash dog toleys off the pavement and into the gutter. There’s a lane, a
snicket, down to the main street behind the houses a little farther down the
road. I call it Dogshit Lane. It’s a gallery of old and new, solid and runny,
brown and yellowish-green, lumpy and cylindrical, sausage-like and segmented
dog-turds. It’s the Tate Dogshit. It’s unspeakably vile.
Most of you will know the sickmaking
experience of cleaning dogshit from the sole of your shoe. Have you ever had to
carry a crying child in your arms all the way to the house, strip the clothes
off her back and immerse her in a bath because she tripped while playing IN A CHILD’S PLAY AREA and was smeared from
head to foot in mutt-shit? I have. In this very house Herself and I now
inhabit. When my daughter was a child, precisely that happened in the
playing-field behind the house. Over thirty years ago, when it was her Granny’s
house. So it’s not a new phenomenon around here. But it’s just as nauseating.
Heard of Toxocariasis? It’s a really
unpleasant illness humans can contract from dogshit that carries the toxocara
roundworm. The Big Tox can cause rheumatic, asthmatic and/or neurological
symptoms in humans and can even lead to blindness. Think about that the next
time Pongo lowers his arse, spreads his cheeks and dumps his load on the green.
Fuck
the selfish dog owners and, if it needs to come to that, fuck the dogs too.
People, children especially, take priority. The next lump of dogshit on the
pavement outside my house will be lifted on a shovel and taken to the offending
dog-owner’s house and deposited there, where it belongs. We need to force
owners to pick up their animal’s shite and dispose of it sensibly. Fine them a
hundred quid every time they don’t. Get big mean dudes, pay them as Dogshit
Agents and entitle them to demand payment from offending owners. Either that or force them to put nappies on Fido
every time he’s outside.
Failing that, make them lift all the
dogshit from the polluted parks, playing-fields and streets for a while. Let
them actually SEE and SMELL what it is, rather than stroll ahead whistling
while Hereboy evacuates his bowel.
Oh,
and take the mutt from them. Obviously.
No comments:
Post a Comment