Just Doo It
My beagles and I have an arrangement. I agree to pick up after them after they do their business, and they agree not to tell the other members of my family what I eat after everyone else has gone to bed. The deal seems simple enough, but it turns out that there used to be questions about whether or not dog owners should be required to scoop the poop at all. In the 1970s, NYC was awash in excrement. City officials pushed several possible solutions, including requesting the pets only go to the bathroom in the privacy of their own yards or mandating the use of sewer drains as toilets (it took me years to train my human offspring to do that). When it came to potential solutions, “the biggest obstacle was hostile pet owners, who argued that it would be physically challenging to hold onto a dog while simultaneously collecting its waste. They also complained that they would be ‘humiliated by being forced to pick up excrement from the gutter.'” (As if humiliation wasn’t one of the joys of pet ownership – and parenthood.) But then a man named Edward H. Lehner, who recently died at the age of 93, came up with a potential fix that combined a law and some (plastic) handy advice. But there would still be years of debate. “‘The purpose of this bill is laudable, i.e., to require each pet owner to take care of his own,’ the future Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, then New York’s secretary of state, wrote in a memo outlining his department’s view of the bill. But not only would an officer have to catch ‘a dog and his owner in flagrante delicto’ to enforce the law, he added, there was also the ‘sticky problem’ of proving that ‘a particular piece of evidence emanated from a particular aperture.'” At a moment when we’re bombarded with flagrante delicto coming out of political apertures nonstop, let’s pause for a little pick-me-up that changed NYC and cities across the country. NYC (Gift Article): Edward Lehner, Who Made Dog Owners Pick ‘It’ Up, Dies at 93. Yes, we’re leading with a story about political action that removed shit from your life, instead of merely piling more on. If that’s not a man-bites-dog story, what is?
