Poop

(A picture of Rupert, a Westie mentioned later in this entry.)

"Deer poop is delicious," Birdy told us. She spoke through action, bringing a mouthful of the little round turds into the house a few nights ago without my husband noticing. I wasn't aware of her subterfuge until I put her into her crate and noticed her mouthing something. Ick. I cleaned them up from her bedding while sighing, "Oh, Birdy!" The next morning I found a couple of the hard brown marbles dropped downstairs on her way through the house.

Fortunately, Birdy has no interest in eating the poop of other dogs. Nor is she interested in our cats' poop, even though one of the felines, the house princess, Miss June Jumpha, has a tendency to leave hers unburied. But deer poop is delcious.

Fortunately, one of the lessons we learned in Meredith Gage's Pawsitive Experience dog training class, fourth week, was "leave it." I say, "leave it" while giving a little tug on the leash. When my pup looks up at me I reward her with a treat. This is a tough one to have carry over from one day to the next. (She has also developed a taste for those little winged pinenuts that are now all over the ground in our yard and many of our neighborhood streets in this land of the tall pine.)

One of the big changes in my life now is the attention I must pay to the poop of another being. Has she pooped yet today? How many times? What did it look like? Will she be asking to go out suddently later? And, very importantly, is there a plastic bag in my pocket when we go opn walks?

I learned the lesson of the plastic bag long before we got the Bird dog. Many years ago I went to visit my friends Lee and Jay in Provinctown shorty after they'd bought their first West Highland Terrier. One night I volunteered to take him for a walk, perhaps because both men were out. I'm not sure why. Well, even though Rupert had already had a poop on a previous walk, he decided to have another. A woman walking nearby with her husband scolded me, telling me it was a $200 fine if I didn't pick up the poop. I had no plastic bag. So she handed me a Kleenex from her pocket. I picked up the poop in the kleenex and carried it to the nearest (not all that near) garbage can. Since that day of a handful of poop, I have a plastic bag in my pocket any time I walk a dog.