Does Not Love Dogs

When it comes to our furry canine friends, I can usually take them or leave them. However, at the moment, I have two grown labrador retrievers as roommates. When I say roommates, I mean in the sense that I occasionally must take them for walks, pick their steaming, smelly poo up off the sidewalks, and endure their earnest stares and colossal thumping tails as I eat my meals. Good news: such maintenance only falls to me every so often. Bad news, in case you missed it: I'm picking up steaming, smelly dog poo. Let's examine this aspect further.

One, I've never been a stellar primary care provider for canines. In high school, my mother actually took two of my dogs to the pound as I continually forgot to feed them. Before you call the SPCA on me, this was a long time ago, and both of them are in a better place now, I'm sure. Two, even when these two were in my questionable care, they lived outdoors and could poop wherever they damn well pleased. If you stepped in it, well tough titty, go find some pavement on which to vigorously scrape your shoe and move on. Yet in large cities, it is mandated that one eradicate all evidence of canine defecation and disseminate plastic, feces-filled baggies in sporadic city trash cans.

Enter me: not above getting my hands dirty by any means, but I used to have standards. Yet last week I found myself staring at several greenish-brown turds of hazardous bio-waste lying next to a spindly tree growing out of the sidewalk. After using their hind legs to kick dirt in a direction that was nowhere near the crime scene, my "roommates" mingled around, pulling on the leashes like there was nothing left to see.  Turning a plastic bag inside out, I placed my hand in one end, held my breath, and approached. For those of you who have never had this experience, imagine microwaving Play-Doh, rolling it in vomit, and tossing it in a bag of fart smell, and you'll have some idea of what this stuff feels like when there's nothing separating you from it than the thinnest of plastic. After procuring all of the pieces, I tied a knot in the bag but not before catching a whiff and almost tossing my cookies all over the sidewalk. Boomer looked at me, tail wagging and tongue lolling. "Don't even..." I wanted to say. "You did this. We're not friends." I don't think they speak English though, because they both still shadow me in the kitchen. They can be lying on their sides, seemingly oblivious to the world, and one click of fork on plate and heads are up, tails are thumping, and puppy dog eyes are in full effect. I'm immune to such tactics. They may occasionally receive a head scratch, but with the smell of their poo still lingering in my nostrils, there ain't a whole lot of room left for sympathy.