‘Pick Up’ a New Habit
By Carrie Sikorski
Published in the Vashon Beachcomber August 4, 2022
It’s hard to pick up a new habit. I know because I’m the one who remembers that my reusable bag is out on the dashboard of my car just as I step up to the checkout at the grocery store. But I have developed a habit over the past few years that I feel good about. I always pick up my dog’s poop in a bag and drop it in the garbage.
Thirty-five years ago, I moved to a home adjacent to what is now Island Center Forest. For decades I walked my dogs without a leash and without a care about whether or where they relieved themselves along the way. Like many others, I resented the county’s decision to require leashing dogs in ICF. It took at least a year for me to remember to consistently leash up. Having evolved that far, I took pride in my dog’s instinctive behavior to poop along the side of the trail instead of on it, sparing other trail users a squishy, smelly footstep or bike tread track.
But I also felt sheepish leaving it behind.
In the back of my mind was a conversation from about a decade back, when I was commuting with a watershed manager in Pierce County. Our conversation had veered from managing horse manure to what to do about dog manure. My solution at the time was to scoop and fling it into the forest perimeter of my property. “Weelllll, what you should do is bag it and put it in the garbage”, she countered. This defied common sense. Doesn’t a lot of garbage go to third world countries or, worse yet, wind up in the ocean sometimes? How absurd that ideally all the dog waste on Vashon should be trucked off-island! These days it’s obvious from the handy, trailhead bagging stations that is exactly what public health experts want us to do.
Now I know our Vashon garbage goes to the Cedar Hills Landfill. When disposed of in our garbage, pet waste (cats, too) enters a carefully regulated solid waste management system where leachate is collected and routed to the same sewer treatment facilities where human waste is treated. Think of dog waste as like the human variety in disposable diapers. Since our communities have more dogs than babies it’s even more imperative that it be handled like the toxic waste that it really is.
Behind all the rationalizations for why we don’t pick up after our dogs, I suspect the underlying reason is the very reason we shouldn’t leave it behind. It stinks and it's full of pathogens, parasites, and zoonotic diseases. We know it’s not good for us. Thousands of creatures in our fields, forests and shorelines probably feel the same. Dogs eat a commercial diet; what comes out the other end is nothing like the natural food chain. The by-products of their digestive systems shouldn’t be deposited willy-nilly where they dissolve into puddles, creeks, wetlands and shallow groundwater. Nor should it be left behind on beaches where kids play in the sand and juvenile aquatic species are just beginning life.