’Tis the season for making New Year’s resolutions, and dog lovers can do their part when it comes to cleaning up after their pooch in 2010. Scooping Spot’s poop is the law, and violators risk getting ticketed $250 for flouting it. But that doesn’t deter many people from leaving their pets’ poo behind on city sidewalks — especially when it rains or snows. Maybe they figure that snow conceals it, so why not just leave it?
City legalese for leaving doo behind is “committing a nuisance on a sidewalk.” Having stepped in many piles of nuisance, most recently while wearing a brand-new pair of Anna Sui FitFlop boots, I’d like to say this to suspecting dog owners: Unlike alternate-side parking, poop-scooping does not get suspended on snow days, so make a resolution to do the right thing for the rest of 2010!
Granted, nobody wants to stay out in inclement weather even one minute longer than necessary, but really, this civic duty takes just a few seconds. Leaving it, on the other hand, creates a huge mess in the form of a fecal-matter slick that pedestrians inadvertently track indoors. (If this happens to you, get a bottle of Get Serious stain and odor extractor, which removes all trace of liquid and solid waste; getseriousproducts.net).
Resolve to make picking up a plus for the global environment, too. Don’t use plastic bags: They take decades to decompose. Instead, use a biodegradable dog-waste bag such as the blue ones by Bags on Board (bagsonboard.com).
Once you’ve picked up, please discard the droppings in a city trash can. Don’t use the cans outside private residences. Building superintendents hate that. On trash collection mornings, some supers remove the telltale blue doggie bags from their cans and toss them out — a la “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” — into the road, where they get flattened by cars, making a really nasty mess. This is easily avoided: If the city trash can on the corner is missing or overflowing, just carry Spot’s poop to the next one.
Finally, resolve to not let your dog urinate on the trees planted as part of the “Million Trees NYC” project (milliontreesnyc.org). The project’s goal is to plant 1 million new trees across the five boroughs over the next decade. And while the big oaks in the urban forest have survived decades of dog pee, these skinny saplings aren’t tough enough yet; please steer Spot away to take care of business.
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