Dog Poo

My experiences with dog poo have been entirely negative. I have regularly been inconvenienced by someone else's negligence and been forced to go through the process of extracting dog poo from the sole of my trainer with a thin stick. Why do trainers always have such intricate patterns on the sole, making this task infinitely more difficult than it needs to be? By far my worst experience of dog poo I have endured is when my hand plunged into a warm sticky mound of the stuff after a hefty tackle on a football pitch. With no water to cleanse my hand I had to do my best with a grassy hand rub before trying to keep my hand as far away from my nose as possible for the rest of the game.

I wonder what percentage of dog owners relieve the rest of us of their pet's waste. The percentage in my road is surely pretty low - I pretty much have to perform a hopscotch down the road to escape faeces-free and when I am pushing a bulky three-wheel buggy down the street my odds of completely the obstacle course of poo decrease dramatically.

Poole Council have had enough of this scourge on their streets - they no longer want the nickname Pooey Poole (they haven't really got that, I just made it up) and they have come up with an odd and quite likely ineffective way of battling the polythene bagless brutes. They have decided to spray-paint dog poo bright green. Shaun Robson, head of environmental services says, "We hope the paint will help highlight the size of the problem [it will literally do that] and change people's behaviour." The painted poo will sit there as a statement for a week before being removed. Poole Council assure the public that pavement poo will be dealt with and their experiment will be limited to poo on grass verges and the like which makes their choice of green paint a slightly odd one. Surely a lemon yellow or ocean blue would stand out better against the green grass.

This council policy has created political discussion through their actions in Poole with the Conservatives, who have long been the most popular party in the area, receiving criticism from the Liberal Democrats for their "bizarre" way of dealing with the problem. Poole residents have also had their say about the issue on the Bournemouth Echo website. Bourne Free says, "I hope the seagulls don't think they are large caterpillars" while EGHH, in response to the fact that this is a waste of people's council tax, says, "They could sell it to the Tate Modern". Hmm... I just hope I don't have a repeat of the hand-to-poo scenario this football season.