23 March 2017
Poo Bags
An image for the 21st century.
By Chin Chin
Oh, the beauty of an English woodland in spring. The trees are coming into bud and, in the deciduous forests, last year’s leaves and the icicles of winter have gone to make space for the new growth. Nothing is left from before. The change in the seasons has cleansed the boughs of the decomposing remnants of last year. That is how it ought to be, but alas it is not. According to the Campaign to Protect Rural England there are glittering objects among the trees. They are not dew drops. They are not winter’s icicles slow to melt. They are plastic bags containing dog excrement which have been left hanging on branches by walkers and ramblers.
It is a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences. In the old days, dog excrement lay where it fell, subject to the efforts of owners to “stick and flick”, a haphazard practice for those who do not play golf and one which created booby-traps if you like picking up sticks. More importantly, it was not a system which worked well in parks where children gambol in and out of the bushes. “Oh darling, what have you got on your shoe? No, I don’t think it is chocolate!” So the poo bag was born and dog walkers would no more think of leaving excrement on the ground than of crossing the road when the pedestrian light is set at red. It works well enough in towns where you can generally find a bin to toss your bag into. It works less well in the country.
Suppose you are setting out on your walk. Fido, or his less conventionally named equivalent, excretes onto the footpath. What are you to do? Fortunately you have come prepared and have an appropriately sized plastic bag in your pocket. You scoop in the approved fashion but the difficult question is what to do next. Unlike the London parks, the countryside is not covered with bins and so you have a choice. One possibility is to put the bag into your pocket. That is an unattractive proposition if your walk may include a bit of scrambling because inadvertent pressure on the bag could have unpleasant consequences. The alternative is to tie the bag to a tree and collect it on the way home. That strategy has two shortcomings. First, it only works if you come back exactly the way you went. Otherwise there will be no opportunity to reclaim the bag. Second, you have to be able to find the bag and identify it. Unless you have had the bag embossed with your dog’s initials, like a shirt made by a Hong Kong tailor, it will look much like others hanging on the same tree and you would hardly want to take a bag filled by somebody else’s pooch. How would you know that its owners they had tied it up properly, for example? Faced with these difficulties it seems that many people just tie a bag to a branch of the tree and then forget about it. The consequences for the countryside are dire.
In pre- poo bag days a combination of the English weather and stick and flick would have sorted matters out fairly quickly. True, there was a risk of an unpleasant surprise for those venturing into the undergrowth but, courting couples aside, they are usually wearing boots. A rainstorm and it was sorted. Plastic bags tied to a tree do not disappear so easily. They hang there from one season to another like a clue in a rather smelly version of hare and hounds. If you look on the Internet you will find advertisements for biodegradable bags but that doesn’t seem to move things forward at all. At some stage the bag breaks down and deposits its contents on the ground. Better to have left them there in the first place. Now there will be no one to flick them to one side.
It is a perfect example of what happens when people from the town carry their practices into the countryside. Something which worked perfectly well inside the M25 is a menace outside it. Does this sound familiar? Well yes, it is the Brexit debate in microcosm. The benefits bestowed by the EU on London were translated (by the exchange rate) to a burden elsewhere. Or look at the operation of the Euro zone where a currency which works for Germany causes mayhem in Southern Europe.
If there is one lesson from Europe’s current travails it is that different systems suit different places and that efforts to impose an arbitrary uniformity are doomed. In the case of dog excrement there should be different rules for town and country. Meanwhile, next time you brush against a tree and find that there is an unpleasant brown substance on the sleeve of your shirt, be of good cheer. You may face a smelly walk home but there is a compensating thought. You have touched the very essence of the 21st century.
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