Kate's Point of View

With awareness of the fact that I have mentioned dog poop in this medium many, many times now (here, here and here for starters), I have yet another dog poop story. To put it on context though, I must explain that my current mental health status is questionable. For reasons that are hard to put into words, I am experiencing incredible stress and anxiety of late and these feelings are presenting themselves in the forms of:

• Weight fluctuations
• Lack of sleep
• Increased grinding of my teeth
• Inability to open my mouth all of the way during the week (related to grinding)
• Headaches during the week (again, related to the grinding)
• Irritability

So now, I have ideas about why all of this is occurring, reasons I will not be sharing here for fear of being dooced. But the important thing to take note of is that I am stressed and often on the brink of losing it.

For the past few days I have been dog sitting my family dog, Maggie Dog. Maggie Dog is kinda awesome because she is such a pu$$y and kind of worthless as far as dogs go but I still love her, of course. So the other day I went home over lunch to take Maggie Dog for a walk and to take a break and try and regain some mental stability. Popsicle in one hand and Maggie Dog’s leash in the other, we walked about a whopping 4 blocks. (Maggie Dog weighs about 13 pounds and is 10 years old so four blocks is pretty far for her. I took her on a mile-and-a-half run the other day and I think it almost killed her.)

During the walk Maggie Dog made a deposit on someone’s tree lawn. I had of course forgotten a bag but thought I would pick up her deposit on the way back from the walk with my then empty Popsicle wrapper. (Being a dog owner / sitter has some really nasty aspects that no one talks about.) As we continue on our walk this neighbor woman starts RUNNING after me. RUNNING after me for like two blocks before I notice her.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Are you from this neighborhood?” Now, to clarify, this is the shit that pisses me off about communities and small towns that people can feel like we are a scoop-poop kind of neighborhood or whatever. But, I say, “Yes, I live down the street,” since she knows this and has talked to me on multiple occasions. “Well,” she says. “I saw your dog just poop and you didn’t pick it up.”

I was pretty dumbfounded so I mostly stared at her and explained my plan and then kept walking. But this, I tell you, was the final straw.

And so I went home and cried.

And I could blame it on the dog poop obsessed neighbor. But instead, I think I will lame it on dog poop. And all of the unmentionable things that have led me to a place where dog poop can lead me to tears.

I wrote Life as a newly anointed cat-person and realized only afterwards that I never shared the Deer Poop Diarrhea story in this forum. I couldn’t at the time. I was too scarred. But now, weeks later and later my apartment has started to smell normal again, I give you Deer Poop Diarrhea.

Okay, back when I was crazy and forced to drink beer to salvage my sanity, I had two puppies I was fostering: Curtis and Clarice. They were mostly just being their own canine selves and that was stressing me out, but ah well. For a freelance gig I have I was asked to write an article about dog parks. I thought Perfect!, I will take the dogs and interview other people with dogs while being a good foster mom at the same time. (I love to multi-task.) So Wonder Boy and I headed out to a local dog park but never found it. The whole drive Curtis and Clarice were in their carrying case crying away so after a while of looking for the dog park we gave up and took them to local city park that is big and very pretty. The pups were so small that leashes weren’t even an issue since I can pretty easily outrun something with an inseam of 3 inches.

The dogs loved being able to run around. More so, though, they loved being able to eat the deer poop that was everywhere. When I saw everywhere, I mean there was no feasible way for Wonder Boy and I to keep it out of their mouths. So after a while we gave up and just took them home.

On the way home I questioned Wonder Boy about the increasingly bad stink in his car. His sniffer is just about broke so he had no idea what I was talking about but it was so bad I rode with the windows down. Then we got them home and saw the source of the stink. They had vomited deer poop pellets all inside their carrying case.

After giving them their third bath of the day and cleaning out the carrying case (thank you, Wonder Boy, for doing that) we thought all was well.

But no.

For the next 48 hours the puppies had Deer Poop Diarrhea. Oh. My. God. Nothing on this planet should smell that bad. Even Wonder Boy could smell the Deer Poop Diarrhea and he, a nurse, said the only smell he could think of that was worse was when someone gets a gut bleed. It was nasty. After cleaning it up for like the 28th time, I called Wonder Boy in tears and said I was done.

Done. With all of it. With the puppies. With Deer Poop Diarrhea. Done.

They are adopted now so all is well. And my apartment is final starting to lose that scent of Deer Poop Diarrhea.

As mentioned on several prior occasions (here and here), I am a dog person. Ironically, my brief foray into dog ownership showed me the light. Although very sweet and giving with their love (there is nothing like little puppy kisses on your neck), it’s not all fun. The problems with dogs include, but are not limited to:

• You have to train them to poop outside
• You have to train them to pee outside
• They eat poop
• They drink pee
• They eat vomit
• They sniff butts
• Puppy crying sounds like you are strangling a newborn
• Their food is the nastiest smelling thing, only to be outdone by the smell of dog diarrhea after your dog has eaten some deer poop

Based on my horrendous introduction into actual dog ownership, I have started to have a new appreciation for cat because:

• They poop and pee in boxes and can be trained to do this while they are still very young

You’ll notice that having poop, pee, vomit and diarrhea routinely finding their way to my floor for the period of 3 ½ weeks pretty much changed me to the new cat-loving person I am today.