Today I was paid a compliment. On walkies this lunch time a man on a bicycle passed us (me and Ralphie) and said: “There’s not many that do what you do, that’s fore sure.” I was bending over to clean up dog poo off the pavement at the time.

And he’s possibly got a point, I see a lot of dog poo around and, oddly, a lot of dog poo bags – full ones. If you’ve gone to the trouble of bagging a poop, surely it’s no hardship carrying it home or popping it in the nearest bin?

Admittedly, Ralphie tends to ‘go’ at the start of his walk rather than near the end; I think he secretly likes me to carry around his smelly stomach contents for the whole walk, but still, I’d rather carry it for 20 minutes than leave it on the pavement. Apart from that one time when the poo bag split…

Yes, we’ve all been caught short without a poo bag and we’ve used tissues and bits of paper in the past, but bagging it and then leaving it seems daft. A friend of mine mentioned seeing a large pile of dog poo bags – all filled – in a neat heap by Willen Lake earlier this week. She assumed one person had dropped a bag, on the part of lake where bins are scarce, and so others had followed suit. So who’ll eventually pick all those bags up, I wonder?

‘I guess you’d need a pretty big poo bag to clear up after a horse!’

This table shows that Milton Keynes Council aims to “empty litter and dog waste bins at a frequency that prevents them overflowing” and “provides a regular service, responding to reports of overflowing bins within the three working days”. What we can do to help them is “report damaged or over flowing bins, not use the litter bins for household or commercial waste and clean up after our dogs”.

I used to moan about full bins or the lack of them in some areas until it occurred to me some poor soul has to empty them… and no one fancies a trek half way around a lake just to empty a bin full of doggy dos. And I think the council does a pretty good job.

On the subject of poo, I recently found out that it’s fine for horses to plop all over the pavement, even if it’s frowned upon when dogs do it. I guess you’d need a pretty big poo bag to clear up after a horse! But that’s not the reason, there’s no legislation against it, apparently.

For those particularly concerned about poo on pavements, of any kind, perhaps we could call in this man, AKA the poop snooper? You gotta love newspaper archives.

Picture by zimpenfish via Flickr under this licence