Please!! Pick Up After Your Dog!

After last week’s "bomb cyclone," we still have plenty of dirty snow, garbage bags, Christmas trees, loads of pine needles and something else all along the streets in the neighborhood. I just came home from volunteering at P.S. 58 and, lo and behold, in the hour that I was gone, someone walked their dog in front of my house and left a hefty pile of poop behind. This is the second time in two months that I’ve had to clean someone else’s mess from in front of my house. I cannot tell you how many times I uttered the full version of "SOB"as I went inside to get rubber gloves, plastic bags and ammonia, came back out and cleaned it up. Think of Zia Pinuzza on the SicilanGuy videos and that will give you an idea of how angry I was. I was completely disgusted!

Do people think that because the streets are already messy or that temperatures have been frigid that they have license to not pick up after their dogs? Do you want your kids traipsing through dog poop and then walking into school or into your house with that on their shoes? I had to warn a lady with her head buried in her phone to watch where she stepped before I was able to clean it up today. If she had stepped in it, that would have been a much bigger clean-up and would have probably required the hose and I would probably still be cursing.

I don’t understand; if you want to live here, why wouldn’t you want things to be clean? And if, for some reason, you forgot a bag, there are likely newspapers in everyone’s recycling cans so you can use a piece of paper to scoop it up and then drop your dog’s poop in your own garbage pail or into a pail on Court Street or Smith Street.

A couple of years ago, my husband and I had the sidewalk in front of our home leveled, had a low fence placed around the tree and planted a garden inside. By the next day, there was clear evidence that a dog had been in the garden. Some people are so oblivious that they allow their dogs to urinate right inside the fence while we are standing there; usually they are also absorbed with their phones. I don’t like confrontation and I know dogs have to go somewhere but how discourteous can you be?

New York State’s pooper-scooper law, enacted in 1978, sets the fine at $250 for those violating the law. In the forty years since then, I have yet to see someone actually receive a ticket but there are few things that would give me such pleasure. Please, dog-owners of Carroll Gardens, be considerate of your neighbors and pick up after your dog!!

As a courtesy, there will be no photos accompanying this post.