Hi y’all.
South Poop started here on WordPress all those years ago (can it be 10 years…).
About five years ago, we moved. We had a site redirect going for a few years, but it has now lapsed.
We still get visitors at WordPress.com because our most ‘poopular’ post on this site ranks pretty high with teh Google.
It’s Curb your ‘Curb your dog‘
So now that you’re here, here’s the ‘scoop’:
We’ve got our own domain at southpoop.com now – please visit us there!
#southlooppoop
A rare picture sent to us by a correspondent captures poo scofflaws scampering from police in Cottontail park:
Probably the best picture of the Father, the Dog and the Child, it is a medium sized golden colored dog. This pic even shows the two Police starting to walk through the park, they are right before the drinking fountain [at the top left]. After being talked to by the Police, which was likely ‘Hey, leash your dog!’, the Police even pointed to the dog, the adult leashed the dog, and the party walked off to the exit at Federal [on the northwest side of the park]. That gives us an idea where they live, i.e. Dearborn Park II, if they lived on State, they would have used the Plymouth exit…
That looks like a big dog. That means they left us with a big poo.
It also means that the cops had an opportunity to earn a fat $500 check for the city. Too bad they missed that, huh?
And that poor kid, being brought up in a life of crime.
Such a shame.
It’s important to keep track of your time, isn’t it?
Scheduling your monthly business on the 2015 Monthly Doos dog poop calendar might be a good thing to do.
Every home should have one! $6.95 cheap!
(And check out the rest of their site, the guy has gone poo crazy, poor fellow.)
The poo controversy builds at Bartelme Park: Sledding Kids Covered With Dog Poop in West Loop, Neighbors Angry
This is particularly interesting because this park has a so called ‘Dog Friendly Area‘ that has, obviously, been rejected by a significant number of dog owners in the area. Despite similar and substantial off-hours off-leash dog use at other Chicago parks, it’s rare to see this much poo controversy.
If you read the article, there seem to be a lot of comments that exhibit a patronizing disrespect for dog owners – who largely, just want to exercise their dogs.
Perhaps it’s worth considering – has the 4000 sq ft ‘DFA’ actually engendered mutual contempt? Seems more like a prison than a dog park to us:
Rockford District Council asks ‘Can We Make ‘Poo’ Go Viral?’ Yes, yes, we can!
We’ll be working on transcribing the lyrics so we can all sing along!
A Dog in a Sweater Doing Business:
Buy it now for $50,000.
Everybody’s talking about it.
It’s been a bad winter in Chicago, and that means that as the snow melts several month’s worth of poo emerges.
You see the trash, broken bottles, cigarette butts, too…
But it’s the poo that gets the attention.
Fools at the Streeterville park leave dog shit in the tennis courts and get shut down!
Idiots at Coliseum Park leave dog shit all over the park…
But think about it.
It’s pretty straightforward to do the numbers.
All it takes is one dog owner leaving his dog’s poo behind every day for 60 days to mean that on some lovely March morning in the melting snow pack there are 60 shits to gaze upon.
There are hundreds of dog owners around.
It only takes the 1%.
via Reddit
Poo Disaster at Coliseum Park:
Sloopin poster Paul Kersey is inflamed about Dog Crap in the South Loop!
Is anyone out there as sick and f…ing tired of the self entitled a..holes who don’t pick up there dogs crap in coliseum park as I am. I sure other parks have same issues. This morning this guy had 2 brown lab puppies and both crapped and he didn’t even think about it. WHAT CAN WE DO..
Found on the internets:
Don’t worry y’all, we’ll be back!
Real life just gets in the way, you know?
We’re gearing up for a full schedule of South Poop posts and analyses in the coming year!
A beautiful day for a walk with the pups! Your South Poop correspondent was happily daydreaming about the miracle of the poo fairies that everyday magically appear to clear orphan poo from this corner of the South Loop.
But the first poo of Fall was indeed waiting somewhere out there, hidden in this colorful Halloween scene:
We wonder who will find it first? A costumed child frolicking on a cool Fall day? Or the grumpy lady walking home after a bad day at the office? Or the rats… will the rats enjoy a tasty treat?
Can you find the poo?
thx to Terrierman’s Daily Dose.
A supporter of South Poop writes –
There’s a new BIG dog leaving poop on 15th Street. Wonder what he’s been eating? Let’s call him Tommy Two Tone! Watch for him and his monster poos!
Burnham Station Condominiums is no 1401 S. State St – the dog people there have a reputation as among the most responsible in the area.
But we found this unfortunate accident waiting for us on those grounds this morning. Somebody’s going to be tweeting about stepping in poo this AM:
It has been a while since we’ve seen something like this at Burnham Station. We hope it’s not the start of a disturbing new trend.
Poo Alley is just around the corner. Take it over there miscreant!
– sad lonely poo –
… looks like somebody is taking a sniff!
Check out this PET-ition at Change.org!
I Want Poo Free Parks! Sign the PET-ition!
Dog owners, dog lovers, dog haters…no matter who you are, everyone despises stepping in POO at the park. The solution is proven and simple: provide the dog poo bags necessary for owners to pick up, and they will DOO it. Unfortunately, the cost for biodegradable bags, conveniently located dispensers, and continuous service is unaffordable for most park systems.
That’s when the Poo Free Parks Founder, Bill Airy, realized a brilliant solution: create a local business that provides a convenient and consistent supply of biodegradable bags to dog owners, but instead of charging the taxpayers, find local businesses who want to support the cause by advertising on a discrete sign attached to each station. This ensures that the dispenser stations are always filled with good quality biodegradable bags, free from graffiti and vandalism, and at no cost to the City or its taxpayers. Simple. Perfect.
Unfortunately, while your parks managers believe that this is a good program, there are a couple of residents out there who would claim that they speak for you, and would rather watch all of us step in poo than see this eco-friendly program enter our parks. They are putting up quite a stink, and this PET-ition serves as a way to turn their bark into the whimper that it really is.
Poo Free Parks® partners with municipalities around the nation to supply, install, and maintain eco-friendly pet clean-up stations, at no cost to the City or the taxpayer. Best of all, sponsorship revenues generated by Poo Free Parks® are shared with the park system for use towards other community programs.
If you feel that your park system should partner with Poo Free Parks, then please sign this PET-tion and pass it along.
Imagine – a poo bag dispenser on every corner…. It could happen. And… it would cost us nothing.
Find out more about Poo Free Parks, take a look at their interactive poo bag dispenser map (it’s teh awesome!), sign the PET-ition, and let your Alderman know you support the P0o Free Parks program!
Here’s a fun new game for kids and grown-ups everywhere!
Can you find the poo?
A.
B.
C. This is a hard one. Extra credit!
Found this in an alleyway under the El:
The small rocks scooped up make it seem like a tasty treat!
Things seemed pretty clean on the streets during our walk with the pups this evening.
Until we came face to face with this:
Well sited, my friend. It’s huge, but seems well camouflaged in the cracks and staining of the sidewalk. Dark, almost invisible, isn’t it? Sneaks up on you.
Some party-goer alighting their car will be stepping in that poo tonight for sure.
I don’t normally step in poo… but when I do, I prefer to step in a big nasty poo.
Here:
We tried to capture what a lovely evening for a poo it was –
These hipsters are sure to be giving iScoopy Pal and poopoobags a run for their money!
These Olive ‘Unisex’ Poop Bags are:
So, there you go!
This is an old report from RT, and I can’t embed the video – so you’ll have to go to the link to view it – but it’s amusing nonetheless: “Clean a poop, save a child“.
When a dog’s got to do what a dog’s got to do, what do you do with a doggie doo?
It’s interesting to pick up on a couple of things… like the fact that Lyudmila here has been leaving Mika’s poo in the park for seven fricking years! Mika is not a small dog.
Continue reading ‘bags and scoops installed in Moscow parks’
These poo bag pouches carry a brilliant message (unfortunately they’re only available at select stores in France)!
Ramasser, c’est normal!
Pick up, it’s normal – exactly!
It’s not a stretch to say that most people, certainly most who don’t have dogs, think that it’s ‘weird‘ or ‘gross‘ to be picking up poo, and it’s not a stretch to think that if you walk away from your* poo, many folks would ‘understand’. But as long as it’s socially accepted to feel this way, the problem has to persist.
And fines, admonishments and scolding don’t address this.
“Pick up, it’s normal” does.
Leave it to our European friends at Le Chien du Citoyen to figure this out!
Brilliant.
* If it’s ‘your’ dog, then it’s your poop!
Poetic genius from our friends at Snohomish County Public Works –
If taking care of number two
is number one to you,
then picking up your doggy doo
should matter lots to you.Continue reading ‘lawn sausages will last for weeks / releasing noxious gas’
Today’s Poo Fairy report is for Cottontail Park, Chicago, IL –
Orphan poos were picked up at and around Cottontail Park this morning.
Thank you, Poo Fairy!
A warm sunny day provides a lovely setting for a poo in Cottontail Park:
This just in:
The Chicago Park District has freed Fluffy from the 30# chain link, and they are trying to convey important information about picking up after your pooch, however they have now come up with puzzling new lingo…
What does it mean to LEASH-CURB your pet????
– Puzzled in the South Loop
These new signs have been showing up around area parks:
Here’s this week’s featured poo!
Here’s an initiative that we also heard about on the BBC Scotland show ‘The Scoop on Poop‘ (audio available until 2/27/12) – the Green Dog Walkers project.
Green Dog Walkers is a friendly, non-confrontational way to change attitudes towards dog fouling. Green Dog Walkers are volunteers who have taken a pledge to always clean up after their dog, and carry extra dog waste bags so they can give a bag to anyone who finds themselves without one.
How do you become a Green Dog Walker?
There’s a major publicity effort behind this initiative, so that the public is aware of what it means.
If you see someone wearing a Green Dog Walkers wrist/armband it means they have taken the pledge to:
- always clean up after their dog
- carry extra doggie bags
- gladly give you a poop bag for your dog – just ask.
It’s an interesting idea. Don’t want people beating each other over dog poo. Instead, make it known that you’re a friendly Green Dog Walker, ready to lend a hand (or bag, as it were).
A discussion popped up on EveryBlock Chicago about a month ago: ‘Curb your dog!!‘
Canaryville is a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that “stretches from Fortieth to Forty-Seventh Street between Wentworth Avenue and Halsted”.
Aside from the usual – urban poop is a problem everywhere in the city – what’s interesting about the post was that several commenters brought up the problems with the term ‘Curb your Dog‘.
What on earth does “Curb Your Dog” mean anyway? Perhaps we, and the signs, need to say “Pick Up Your Dog’s Waste Or You Will Be Ticketed!” instead of using some arcane expression to pussyfoot around.
Right on, jim m.!
Whereas Jennifer says:
Curb your dog – you or your landlord owns the property in front of your house (your front yard or steps). the “curb” area is owned by the city. “Curbing” your dog means having them do their business on the “community” property – the area by the curb.
And Kitty chimes in again:
Okay well they are not using the curb they are literally leaving the poop on the side of my fence or in front of my home. I am really annoyed by this..
A lot of people in Canaryville are annoyed at having to clean up after other people’s dogs!
Just like in the South Loop!
Looks like we’ve found the South Poop of England, too.
Check out the site: Dog Fouling and Red Rubber Bands.
There’s some explanation for the ‘Red Rubber Bands’ that makes sense to the British, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. Whatever…
Lots of good stuff there.
And, it seems like their speciality is… dog poo music!
There have been many songs published on this blog. Needless to say, they have varied in quality. Once in a while, a good song thrusts itself at us. I can truly say this of this rendition of “Poop my Shoe”. It almost had tears welling up in my eyes. I love the way it doesn’t focus just on dog faeces but covers a broad spectrum of animal deposits. I challenge you to listen without experiencing a wide range of emotional reactions.
We heard about Dog Fouling and Red Rubber Bands on the BBC Scotland show ‘The Scoop on Poop‘ (audio available until 2/27/12). Take a listen.
Please, let the French explain it to you:
No, the dog poop is not fertilizer! For what has the slightest interest in the land, it should be composted.
The poop left on a green space has no benefit to the parks or gardens, on the contrary. The urine burns the grass and dog droppings can remain for several weeks before disintegrating, which poses a real health problem. It contains germs, bacteria and parasites that are harmful to human health but also for all the dogs that shall put the nose to it.
The least we can say is that dog poop is not a decorative element that friends of the gardens enjoy, and what about its effect on children playing in the grass in the spring or summer?
It is also an issue of respect for the work of the gardener. They do not like most that pedestrians have the dog poop underfoot.
That’s why even in green spaces, it is essential to pick up!
This video has been around a while. Pretty weird.
うんこ保険いかがですか？投票受付中｜Please Vote to Dog Poop Insurance!
Yes, it’s real –
Ever stepped in dog poop and ruined your fave kicks? Well you need Sneaker Freaker Dog Poop Insurance! Thanks to our mates in Japan, Sneaker Dog Poop Insurance could become a reality. All you need to do is watch the video below then VOTE. If we get 100,000 votes a Japanese insurance agency will actually offer this service (we’re not making this up!).
16,414 “Yes I love it” votes as of Feb 13. Looks like they won’t have enough to go forward with the plan.
Too bad for sneaker-wearers everywhere.
Thanks to a Friend of South Poop:
“This little dog must have spectacular hind end awareness, and the skills of an acrobat!”
Proprioception is so important for the modern dog.
You may have heard about a plan in New Taipei City, Taiwan to hold a dog poo lottery last year. The idea was for people to turn in bags of poo and receive a lottery ticket in return. The prize – ingots of gold.
Turns out the plan was “a big success“.
We checked and found this BBC report from last December:
A woman in her 50s won the top prize – a gold ingot worth $2,200 (£1,400). […] The woman who won is among a team of neighbourhood volunteers who already helped to clean up the streets, including by picking up dog mess.
The BBC’s Cindy Sui in Taipei says that it has been credited with halving the amount of dog mess in the city, which is near the capital.
They say the city simply cannot afford to keep exchanging dog poo for gold.
You think?
Too bad for everybody.
But it makes you wonder – could a lottery like this be implemented anywhere? You don’t have to give away gold ingots (yes, “smaller gold ingots, worth several hundred dollars, were given to four other prizewinners“). What if you just had ‘normal’ prizes, like a coupon to your favorite eatery?
How about the South Loop Poo Lottery?
Certainly would bring international attention to Chicago, maybe the City boosters would go for it…
Shanghaiist thinks it's a great idea, too.
It’s sometimes, uh, interesting to review the search terms that led to South Poop. By far the most frequent is
what does curb your dog mean
and, by far our most accessed post is ‘Curb your ‘Curb Your Dog”. But here are a few of the other terms used over the past 30 days:
beautiful flowchart
revenge on people who dont pick up dog shit
유니코드 “pile of poo”
ergonomic goat poop scoop
teacuppoo
so dachshund glad you’re here someone pooped in the hallway
you are only worth as much as your dog’s poop
the best ever poop area designed for a dog
immoral purpose dog shit
A pretty vanilla rant about poo from a blog in Norway…but you gotta love the picture:
I call it "Beauty on the Beast"
We’ve noticed that when we take our dogs out they always poo nearby our house. We can estimate using Google maps that their poo radius is about 300 feet. Are other dogs the same?
We don’t know, yet. But the observation prompts an interesting idea…
Dog poos are not transported by the gods, nor dropped by the birds, nor, generally, left by trekkers traveling miles from home.
They are left behind by our neighbors. Can we be more precise than that?
Which neighbors?
It’s a pretty obvious idea when you think about it, and we all probably implicitly do come to the obvious conclusion: the neighbors nearby. But perhaps if we could come up with a quantitative spin on this we could make that intuition more concrete, and perhaps, more useful.
Consider the ‘probability of poo’ distribution function. The probability is low at distances close to zero (people generally won’t let their pups poo right at the foot of their steps, for example, but someone else’s steps, that’s another matter!) – and then the probability increases with distance, reaching a maximum at some point, and then decreasing as you get farther and farther from home.
There’s probably a right way to do this – collect data from a team of “dog-poo reporters” in order to establish the shape of the distribution function, P(p|d) (the probability of a poo (p) at a distance (d) from home). Then use that prior distribution and a little Bayesian statistics to ask: given the occurrence of an orphan poo at location y, what’s the probability that the poo-coward lives distance x away?
(There must be additional variables, too – poo behavior near a single family home will be different from near a condo, behavior near a front door will be different from a back door, a poo-friendly surface will facilitate poo, winter walks will be shorter than summer walks, etc, etc.)
This might take a lot of work.
But let’s take the easy way out. Imagine that there’s a single poo radius for all dogs (something we admit we have not established) and that the radius is 300 feet (something that might also vary – perhaps FrouFrou goes right away, while hefty Gorgon needs to walk a while to stir things up).
If we can make that simplification, then we can come up with this:
An interesting visualization of something that’s not usually made explicit, isn’t it?
It suggests that we can identify the pool of candidate poo-cowards by simply mapping the position of the orphan-poo.
The five locations identified in the map are recurring poo-hotspots at the southern end of the South Loop:
Each of these sites, some of which are ongoing areas of poo crisis, others that ebb and flow, is created by someone, or several someones, who can be located within a specific geographic pool of residents of the South Loop.
Take MRJ Park, #1 – that site can be assigned to residents of the northern end of the Dearborn Park II development.
Site #2 – ha! 1401 S. State.
And Poo Alley, Site #4 – that one can be assigned to Dearborn Tower (1530 S. State), with residents of Burnham Station and Dearborn Mews perhaps also contributing.
This suggests that it could be possible to use a targeted strategy to address the (local) problem of orphan poo. Find a developing poo-crisis at some location? Then identify the dog owners in the buildings that lie within the poo-radius. Distribute informational leaflets. Talk to them. Instead of writing angry letters about the ‘torrent of dog urine and feces turning [the] urban lawn into a fetid, stinking mire of matted, brown mush‘, a poo-advocate could simply notify the 25 (say) surrounding dog-households to put each on notice that one of them was creating a developing poo-crisis.
Prediction: problem solved.
Thanks to Keep Britain Tidy, the English did it first, but did they do it better?
Now, folks in Colorado are trying it:
But as we all know, there are poo fairies and poo angels all around us.
Like Poop Fairy on Facebook. Or not.
There’s a blog out of Canada that came to our attention when its author commented here (when we first started). She had clearly thought a lot about dog poo, dog parks and dogs in society. It’s worth checking out: the DogKisser Blog.
Here are her posts about poop. This author has a ton of observations that are relevant and useful to us.
Example: the need for trash pickup and bag supply to raise compliance. Otherwise, any policy is neglectful and disingenuous:
What do I think would raise compliance and make people start picking up their dogs’ poop?
- Poop bags at all entrances to Point Pleasant Park.
- GARBAGE CANS to put the poop bags in – and people to EMPTY THE GARBAGE CANS.
- City staff in the parks to FINE PEOPLE who DON’T pick up their dogs poop.
Those 3 things would raise compliance by about 1000%. Right now people know that they can get away with not picking up their dogs poop. So why should they? If there’s no consequences – there’s going to be NO COMPLIANCE. It’s pretty simple.
You can put all the flags in poop that you want. But if you don’t give dog owners some tools to deal with the poop – you’re being VERY disingenous. And unfair.
Example: poo should be considered best as litter; but dog owners are judged as a class:
I liken dog shit to Tim Horton’s cups – people throw them away everywhere – and you see them everywhere, but you’d never consider shutting down any Tim Horton’s coffee shops because of people throwing away their cups irresponsibly instead of putting them into garbage receptacles. Simply because you can assign a niche demographic to place blame on – does not mean that you can shut down access to public space to the whole of that demographic for the irresponsibility of a small minority.
That is completely wrong – and non-sensical as shutting down every Tim Hortons because of their cups being thrown away on street corners. It’s exactly the same thing.
p.s. What’s a Tim Horton’s, eh?
A friend of South Loop sent us these:
"Three colors from a three course meal?? and fresh!!"
"This pile is packed so perfectly!!"
This is too cool. We now have an internationally recognized Unicode character ‘PILE OF POO‘.
The bad news? The only font that I can find that supports this new, internationally recognized, and computationally defined character symbol for Poo is ‘Symbola‘. That’s fine, I guess. You can download the font files and install them on your own computer so that you can write a Word doc incorporating the symbol. But it means that we can’t use this symbol on our site because your browser probably won’t support it! (You just get this: 💩) And that is just sad.
Interestingly, in the comments at BoingBoing (which is where we learned about this fantastic development) a commenter notes that ‘Pile of Poo’ is a Japanese emoji character, and is a carry over of the migration of emoji characters to Unicode. So it may not be that someone thought ‘hey this would be a useful symbol to have!’ – although another commenter notes that:
It was typographer and alphabetician Michael Everson, Irish representative to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, who proposed that character name, which expresses the intent of the character (while other euphemisms were proposed, he tells me, none were nearly as apt).
But we think it’s great!
Here’s this week’s featured poo!
Want your poo featured on South Poop? Let us know!
Pleiades:
Poo:
Looks like the South Poop of NYC!
Presumably coming to you from Park Slope, Brooklyn.
This is a cool site – take a look. Lots of pictures with that special sophisticated New York flair!
More art than analytical, but sometimes, you need some art, doncha?
How about this, for example –
“a deconstruction of the notion that poop, when abandoned, deconstructs”
Only a Po-Mo Art Student from New York City could have come up with a sentence like that!
(You might also be interested in the fine photography at another NYC site – Dogs Shitting on Sidewalks)
We posted about Takkie Kakkie, the family game a while ago. 
Now that it’s been available on Amazon for a while, there’s some bad news.
The newer reviews for ‘Doggie Doo‘ (as it’s called in the US) are not that great. Seventeen (17) one star reviews??
Here are some:
If the little plastic dog is ‘constipated’… well then the game can’t be much fun, now can it?
That seems to be the take-home from these reviews – and we’re all poorer for it.
But there’s also this review from ‘no prude’:
Really? You want a game about dog poop?
I’m no prude, but unless your goal is to teach your kids that being crass is cool and potty humor will advance their character, why would you spend a nickel on this product? This game lowers the bar for preschool and elementary children.With so many positive and educational choices out there, save your money and pass on this ridiculous game.
Feh.
Lady, take a pill and start picking up after your dog. If there ever was an idea for an ‘educational game’, this one was it.
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