Peeing On Poop

This is another dog post. I'm fascinated by the behavior of dogs. I don't understand it. But I suppose dogs have their own wiki page, if I'm ever curious enough to look it up. I like to observe it, though.

The whole thing of dogs going out and being interested in one another's butts, one another's poop and pee, is something that must be endless in its implications. We know dogs are territorial, and that territory has something to do with boundaries. So their bowel and eliminatory functions carry at least a double duty. What precisely, I don't know.

It's aggravating in many ways for me, being less removed (apparently) from the instincts. When it's cold out I just want the dog to pee or poop, not to make it a scavenger hunt for the biggest, boldest, brightest dog who's been in the neighborhood before. I believe in the doctrine of 'any old port in a storm,' but if I left it to the dog, usually, we'd be searching for just the perfect spot till we froze into statues and broke in half from the strong wind.

Yesterday, she was nosing around in the snow. So here we are, nosing, nosing, nosing. I'm glancing around trying to be patient. Nosing, nosing. Finally I yelled, "Come on!" Ooops, that slipped out, since any kind of impatience on my part threatens her ability to go at all. "Good girl."

Something I do, and I know this is socially the right thing to do, is to pick up the poop and take it home for proper disposal. Not everyone does, including neighbors who go by on Rascals, or others who don't have any excuse except that they're clods. So there's a lot of poop in the neighborhood, ranging from fresh and vital all the way to dessicated and rotting. In my walks, several times a day, I see it all.

These little piles aren't all bad news, though, because it gives my dog something to study in her never ending search for a decent place to go to the bathroom. Now, remember, I always clean up after my dog. But today she took a royal pee right on top of some other dog's royal poop, leaving a yellow circle on top of that nastiness. I'm thinking, if someone looks out their window right now, it will look like my dog did the poop and that I didn't clean it up. But they won't say anything to me, allowing me the chance for a realistic defense; they will simply share it among themselves and perhaps to friends.