Howl (11 page)

Confessions of an Amateur Pickup Artist

[David Malley]

I’
M WHAT DOG
people call a “flincher.” I try not to be, and I used to believe that, much in the same way I taught myself to appreciate the salty goodness of an anchovy, I could also learn to cherish a warm canine tongue lapping at my face like it was the inside of an empty bucket of KFC Extra Crispy. But instead, just as soon as a fuzzy little nipper called Tulip or an adorable Akita called Sunshine starts with the licking, my head involuntarily jerks back, my palms begin to sweat, and I commence with nervous laughs designed to give off the appearance of confidence.

For years, I had a list of about a dozen excuses I would routinely use to explain to friends the reason for my doglessness. They started with “I would, but I’m…
allergic
!” and ended with bad jokes like “The only time I strap a leash to
anything
is when it’s dressed in latex and has a gag-ball in its mouth!” In reality, the whole flinching process probably started when I was five years old, when a sneering Doberman Pinscher kept its breed-standard body nicely toned by chasing me up and down the streets of the genteel Oklahoma City neighborhood where I grew up. But, while the catalyst for my flinching is a set of snarling teeth, it all climaxes with the hind end. I’m very sensitive to foul odors, and aside from the whole Eau-de-Poo-Poo breath problem, it would be incredibly upsetting for me if I happened to, for example, acquire a dog that was routinely gassy. Really, it can all be very emasculating.

I’m not squeamish about everything. In fact, when I sit and contemplate things scatological, I find that it’s mostly things that come out the rear exit that make my stomach turn. I’m mostly okay with vomit. I don’t even wince while exchanging spit during a French kiss, which I do often. I’d say I have a very reasonable, probably even healthy, aversion to snot, boogers, and loogies. No, I don’t often mull over such grotesqueries, but now as I watch my youthful early thirties recede like Count Chocula’s hairline and my wife starts to drop those not-so-subtle hints about maybe bringing some little ones of our own into the world, I feel it’s time to start confronting my paralyzing fear of poo.

I think babies are bundles of bliss as long as they’re cooing and cackling at my jokes. And not dirtying their diapers. Yes, I know, baby poop smells of sweet yams and figgy pudding…until they start eating real food…which they will do. That’s when the yams get rotten and the pile starts looking and smelling no different from something John Goodman might eject after a night of nachos and daiquiris. And just when you’ve finished your full-time job of opening little white packages of stink, you find yourself hunching over toilets, making blind swipes at an ungrateful toddler’s stinking anus.

Try taking care of a dog before you go making babies. It’s not an original idea, just an old good one. The ol’ training wheel puppy. I take comfort in this plan. If we crash and burn with the dog, I know a couple of good dog-loving people who’d save me in the end (I call them Mom and Dad), but there’s no nice way to do that with a baby. Besides, every parent I’ve ever known, including my own mother and father, says that crying, drooling, crapping kids aren’t that bad when they’re your own. I imagine the same goes with a dog.

The Scoop

Of course my first real experience looking after a dog involved excrement and misery. Six years ago, I spent ten days dog-sitting a handsome mixed-breed named Skye in New York City, and discovered that I was firmly on my way to becoming poop phobic. From our first “shake,” Skye had my number, and that number was 2. Every half hour or so, the whining would start (first him, then me), and I would find myself being led around a frigid downtown block near where I was living. The Humane Society says that the average canine needs a constitutional walk about fourteen times a week, but Skye seemed to need about fourteen a day.

On our first trip onto Manhattan’s streets, I hadn’t prepared for the not-so-little package Skye proudly left for me at the corner of Broadway and Broome. I panicked.

Thankfully, there was an empty cereal box (Cheerios, I think) in the nearby garbage can, and as I tried to ignore the bewildered looks of passing pedestrians, I held my breath, flinched, and scooped. Then I scooped again. And again. And then some poo touched my finger.

So, sure, this story isn’t so crazy. It’s nothing a real dog owner hasn’t gone through at least a few times. It goes with the territory. And I suppose that’s really my point. Dog owning is a territory, a faraway, war-torn territory that’s riddled with land mines. And now here I am, the pacifist, lined up alongside the trigger-happy loonbird dog people, plastic produce bag over my fist, awaiting my four-legged, stink-dropping mission.

How Do You Doo?

First, if I’m going to be responsible for any kind of animal, I need to do some risk assessment. And I’ve still got some time.

After a few clicks on the Internet, I fear it’s just as bad as I always thought it was: “Ebola Virus: From Wildlife to Dogs.” The article comes from a French science journal—
L’institut de recherche pour le développement
—and explains that humans get Ebola from “infected carcasses of chimpanzees, gorillas and certain forest antelopes” and further, it goes on to point out, in heavy, barely understandable scientific terms, that it is entirely possible that I could have gotten Ebola from my old pal Skye’s excretions. Of course, he would have to have dined on infected gorilla carrion, which is probably pretty hard to find in Manhattan, but still…

As I absorb this helpful information, National Public Radio’s Eleanor Beardsley is bellowing out of my computer. I pause to listen because she’s talking about the benefits of being a trash collector in Paris, and I know, after spending some very romantic evenings dodging sidewalk bombs, Paris is a perfect example of why this world doesn’t need more dog owners. According to the book
Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French
there are around 200,000 dogs in Paris. Those dogs leave ten tons of dog waste behind every day (that’s 4.38 million pounds each year or about the same weight as a fully fueled space shuttle!), and each year, over 500 people break bones slipping on unseen doggy slicks.

But Eleanor Beardsley assures me that’s all changing. “Garbage collectors show up with a Dr. Seuss–like arsenal of cleaning machines,” she says, and that includes “pooper-scoopers” and “side-walk scrubbers.” It turns out that today’s most effective mechanism for keeping Parisian streets clean is “the $200 fine for dog owners caught leaving canine ejection on the sidewalk,” and after I work out just exactly what Ms. Beardsley means by canine-ejection, I begin to realize that if even the French government has mandated that
Parisians
need to pick up after their pets, there must be a good, disgusting reason for that mandate, and I have a feeling it has nothing to do with dead gorillas.

It turns out that aside from spreading Ebola with their excrement, dogs have bacteria in their stomachs that can be transmitted through their feces to potentially turn your human gut into oatmeal—gruesome things like
E. coli
and salmonella and giardia. So what? Disregarded doggy dirt biodegrades into local watersheds, and because of the icky bacteria I mention above, that’s a bad thing. I finally understand why Parisians have been so keen on bottled mineral water for so many years before we tap-water-swilling Americans. What’s worse is, according to
USA Today
, 40 percent of American dog owners don’t bother to scoop poop. And if you’re one of the people not picking up, keep this in mind: Back in the 1990s, a well-intentioned biochemist at the University of Leicester introduced a way to collect DNA from derelict dung to help coppers trace negligent nuggets back to offending owners, and it’s an idea that big cities around the world are taking seriously. A 2005
New York Times
article even suggested that each of the more than one million dogs in New York City should submit a DNA-rich saliva sample upon being licensed so that delinquent owners could be tracked down and fined. The result would be twofold: cleaner streets and increased revenue from the fines. Frankly, there’s only one thing that makes me more nervous than effluence, and that’s the fuzz. If I get a dog, I’ll pick up. I promise. Same goes if I have a kid.

A Call for Help

In the vulgar mulling over this subject, I decide to pick the brain of my good friend Ian Tyndall. Ian is a landscape architect and has been what he calls a PCG (Principal Care Giver for his “doggies”) for forty years. He has two Welsh Corgis named Rose and Rocky whom he’s constantly taking on walks through Washington, D.C.’s parks, and since he is, in part, responsible for planning and designing D.C.’s parks, I know for a fact he’s an avid picker-upper.

“I am a big fan of the
New York Times
delivery bag,” he says, when I ask him about his methods. “It’s free, it comes regularly, and it is sturdy. By carefully taking advantage of the long narrow shape it is easy to pick up a second, and even a third, poop, if things come out that way. Of course, its disadvantage is that it only comes once a day.”

Ian says that when he doesn’t have a spare newspaper sack, he’s like lots of dog owners and grabs a bag from his local supermarket. He prefers the ones from his local Safeway because they don’t use double bags unless it’s absolutely necessary. Of course, the drawback to this Earth-friendly plan is that single bags often get punctured—what I imagine to be a near-tragedy for dog owners who don’t notice the perforations until it’s too late.

After Ian tells me this, I’ve decided that the riskiness in using grocery bags just doesn’t seem worth it to me. So, as I find myself researching strength and permeability of plastics, I discover a Web site run by an Englishman named Paul Mundy, who, in his free time, collects and exhibits exotic examples from “the magical world of airsickness bags.” Somehow his fascination in the bags found on airplanes tucked between the in-flight magazine and the aircraft safety card naturally led him to the world of “doggy bags”—bags especially made for collecting doggy-dung. On his Web site, Mundy displays more than sixty different doggy bags from around the world; many of them come complete with explicit “how to pick up” instructions. In Mundy’s collection, the bag that particularly interests me is the Mutt Mitt. It isn’t the most colorful bag. That would be the “Fido Bag” from China. Nor is it the most innovative. That would be the “Gassi” from Austria, which is a combination of a box
and
a bag. But there’s a subtle sophistication about the Mutt Mitt, and I can actually imagine wrapping one of them around my hand.

I reach out to Rod Lukey at Intelligent Products in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, where the Mutt Mitt is manufactured. I explain my whole not-being-a-dog-guy problem, and then I ask him why on earth anyone should spend hard-earned money on something that grocery stores hand out for free.

“The Mutt Mitt’s protection and functionality are what separate it from a bag,” Rod says. “It’s constructed with a degradable film approximately twice as thick as that of an ordinary grocery bag.”

And that’s where he’s got me. A normal plastic grocery bag is only between .5 and .75 millimeters in thickness, which is great for carrying boxes of Hot Pockets and Hamburger Helper, but for picking up caca, I’m gonna need the full 1.25 millimeters of protection that bags like the Mitt provide. Also, grocery store bags end up festering in landfills for hundreds of years, while the Mutt Mitt “degrades” or decomposes in any environment.

“And, unlike a regular bag,” says Rod, “the mitt has a pouch, which provides an area to store the collected material.”

Rod, who has a yellow Lab named Boone, then goes on to describe the types of people who use products like the Mutt Mitt. I am most interested in his fourth category:

Squirmers.

“Squirmers,” he explains, “fear the idea of picking up after their pet, but recognize it as a social expectation. They consider the process discomforting, and will often walk away from the problem rather than confronting it. We estimate that squirmers are 95 percent male and 5 percent female.”

That’s it! Not only am I a flincher, but I’m also a
squirmer.
As a kid, I was always amazed at my mother’s ability to handle grossness without cringing (let’s just say that when a kid is five and he has to go, he really has to go), and I assumed it was just because she grew up on a farm. But it was because she’s a woman! All of this unrelenting emasculation I’ve been feeling during all these years of doglessness was just in my head. As a guy, I’m simply not hardwired to handle gross stuff.

I think that, with a little help, this is a hurdle I can actually overcome. Twenty-six-year-old Kate Morris, who founded Vancouver’s Doody Duty, seems to think I can. Doody Duty is one of those services that comes to your house once or twice a week and takes care of the doody, so you don’t have to. Obviously, if I had a yard, this would be the perfect choice for a guy like me (my wife tells me they have such services for baby diapers too!), but I’m contacting Kate, not to order her service, but for some sound advice.