Somewhere in the cornfield aside of my house, a forest green dog collar lies on the dirt. Three tags — one for name, one for rabies, one for licensure — begin to rust as the elements slowly degrade them. Perhaps a deer or fox, a coyote or cat has passed it by, pausing to sniff, wondering what it is and what it belongs to.
I don’t know how Emmie managed to lose her collar during a mid-morning walk in the field yesterday, but she did. One moment she had it, the tags jingling as she ran in and out of the cornfield, and then, suddenly, her movement was much quieter. Despite my best efforts, I came up empty-handed after my thirty-minute attempt at finding the collar. Trying to distinguish one green from another green, the saturation levels being the only difference, is not the easiest. Especially not when you’re simultaneously juggling two dogs and pushing through stalks of corn, crouching every few feet to scan the area.
So tonight Emmie sits on the floor, chewing her bone, her new collar — this one reflective, just in case — shining in newness as Mabel watches jealously from a safe distance.
You can understand why, when going for our evening walk in the field tonight, I was a bit more observant of Emmie’s ventures. Keeping her from zigzagging through the cornstalks is not an easy task, but at least this time she didn’t lose her pretty necklace.
None of this is what I want to discuss today, but it provides a bit of background as to what sparked the topic of this newsletter.
As all living creatures do, dogs poop. And they have a tendency of doing so at the most inopportune of times. Whether you forgot the baggies or you’re in the middle of a busy hiking trail, dogs just don’t care. When nature calls, they answer without hesitation. The unfortunate side of this is that dog owners have a poor tendency of thinking that they can leave their dog’s waste on the trail. After all, there’s plenty of wildlife poop around. Even worse is when they bag the waste and leave the bag on the side of the trail, in a tree, hidden under a rock. Why even bother in the first place?
What makes this an important topic to discuss is the environmental repurcussions of dog waste. While waste from wildlife is actually beneficial for the ecosystem — as it is comprised of resources from the ecosystem, which are continuously cycled through — dog waste is made up of high levels of nitrogen, phosphorous, and other nutrients coming from their commercial foods. When an ecosystem is not used to increased nutrient levels, invasive plant species have a better chance of growing and harmful diseases are more easily spread. This is especially the case with dogs, as they tend to carry harmful diseases that can spread to humans through contact with their waste.
People don’t think about this because they aren’t educated about this. Yes, there are signs aplenty at trailheads that mention picking up after your dog, but at least in the United States, our literacy rate is poor enough that I could almost believe most can’t read those signs.
— C