New York, lend me your ears. I know it has been a brutal few weeks of bitterly cold weather while you tried to avoid slipping and sliding down the icy subway steps and navigating waist-high frozen banks. But beyond the hard landing of perilous black ice patches, there is a particular genre of New York City betrayal that arrives with a soft, treacherous squish. Yes, I’m talking about dog poop.
Picture this: It’s a balmy February morning. The snow has receded from gargantuan blocks of immovable ice to gray piles of defeat, the sun slowly melting the structure into an ominous mound of rock-hard gray. You step confidently onto the sidewalk, laptop in tow, wearing your crisp pair of Air Maxes without a care in the world, only to step in the wrong pile of mushy liquid and be greeted by canine negligence, preserved like a doomed truffle for the unsuspecting citizen.
Unfortunately, I don’t have to imagine it. This fate befell my now-sullied Air Max 270s, despite my best efforts at walking with vigilance. Thinking I could avoid a fecal fiasco was a fantasy, anyway. Every year, like clockwork, we repeat this dance. The snow arrives, and the city falls into a romantic lull for a few hours while Instagram feeds are filled with soft-lit snapshots of city blocks and captions about “magical NYC winters.” Meanwhile, beneath that cinematic precipitation is a growing archive of uncollected dog waste, flash-frozen like a municipal biohazard as it turns into a nausea-inducing hydra of animal waste. The moment temperatures rise above 32 degrees, the reveal begins, and the post-snow thaw turns entire sidewalks into obstacle courses; you find yourself zigzagging like you’re avoiding paparazzi, or running an agility drill for a sport in high school, except what you’re stepping around are clumps of melting regret.
Maybe I’m alone in this, but I would rather a more sanitary ritual in my spring awakening.
This time around, the crisis got so bad that an elected official had to step in. Chi Ossé found himself publicly addressing the dog-waste apocalypse, begging constituents to respect the sidewalk, the shared space it is, rather than a citywide off-leash toilet. When a city council member has to intervene and ask residents to pick up after their pets, we have blown past nuisance and entered civic failure. Every step you take now becomes a trust exercise. There is no glamour in walking down a block where the ground looks like cookies and cream but smells like despair.
Before I let my words get misconstrued, let me state for the record that I love dogs. But there are two types of dog-owners—those that understand having a pet in the city comes with sacrifices, and those that delude themselves into believing that the city must bend over backwards to make itself as dog-friendly as possible to the most irresponsible pet owner this side of the Verrazzano. You know the type, the one who insists that “their dog is super friendly” as a means of justifying their right to ignore park rules about leashing your dog, or bringing them along to a bar, or a doctor’s office. I can respect that there has been a seeming uptick in dog ownership in the wake of the pandemic. What I cannot respect is the cognitive dissonance required to believe that your pet’s bodily functions are somehow exempt from basic etiquette. I refuse to believe that bagging and disposing of the poop you are responsible for is beyond your capacity just because it’s suddenly lower than 40 degrees.
The entitlement is what really rankles me. Even if you believe everyone does it, who do you expect to pick up your dog’s waste? It isn’t manure; if you’ve deluded yourself into believing that you are fertilizing the smattering of trees that line your local city block, then disabuse yourself of that notion right now. And no, the sanitation workers will not get it. They are not our fairy godparents of negligence, trucking through neighborhoods with bespoke poop bags in between trash pickups.
The thing about living in a city as crowded as New York is that small choices can quickly affect everyone around you. A city is held up by a social contract between residents who agree to coexist. We agree to tolerate noise and proximity for the sake of convenience. In exchange, we also agree not to make the sidewalk a minefield of thawing excrement, because one abandoned bag becomes ten, and ten becomes a block that will have you praying for the hot-garbage smell.
So yes, this is a rant about dog poop, but it is also a call for decency. Your private convenience does not outweigh public comfort. Stop using the snow as a cover for your laziness; we are all suffering for your cowardice. Be accountable and scoop your dog’s poop. The radical act of bending down, gloved hand inside plastic, and completing the task you signed up for when you adopted that scruffy chaos agent with soulful eyes is really all I ask.
P.S. You are not a better person if you do the bag-and-drop, and leave the plastic sack on the sidewalk “for later.” It is a piece of toxic waste that needs to be immediately placed in the trash. The sidewalk is not a suggestion box for your pet’s digestive aftermath.
Thanks, management.
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