Dirty Dog

Probably disgusting is more appropriate than dirty because my gold-en-re-tri-ver has a voracious appetite for shit, all types of shit, except that is, for dog shit. It's a habit that I've tried to break using pepper or tabasco sauce on selected turds but all that happens is that she takes one sniff and walks away, waits until the next rainfall washes away the offending condiment and THEN eats the shit.

There is some small element of preference and certainly cat shit is a favourite, this she can scent and pounce on much quicker than I can react to attempt to stop her. This means I've had to fence off half the garden to separate the feral cats (after I'd driven them out of the barns) from the dog. After cats would come horse dung and cow pats followed by other small mammals like badgers and hedgehogs

This whole process is really upsetting and I get very worked up about it, so much so that, even though I have a slightly dodgy knee, I have stopped taking a stick on the morning walks. I am frightened that I will lose my temper to such an extent that I might hurt her with it. There has been much publicity over the years about outbreaks of road rage or air rage but I am a walking epidemic of turd rage.

I have to organise the morning walks round this problem and I have a large walking map of the district on a pin-board in the kitchen onto which I put coloured pins to mark the location of different types of excrement so that I can avoid the danger areas. Red is cow-pat, blue,horse dung and yellow for badger pits and other small mammal shit. This gives a constantly shifting multi-coloured abstract of shape and form, especially in the summer months as the sun rapidly leaches the goodness out of the various deposits rendering them unpalatable and then a thunderstorm will temporarily refresh and tenderise the dried pile.

Strangely no-one has ever offered to purchase this work of art!

Probably the most unsavorary aspect of this habit is the dogs love for human faeces, these are not generally widely available to the dog except, as now, in the hunting season. You may have noted that I don't allocate a colour on my pin-board when a human has dumped, this is because there is usually other evidence indicating the location there-of. There are normally sheets of toilet paper wafting across the path; obviously the perps have regular movements, possibly due to the healthy gamey diet they consume and come prepared with paper.

What I can't understand is why is the paper always pink? It's such a girlie colour for such a manly pass-time.