Crap

Pets are great. They keep you company and generally ensure your sanity remains intact. You can get good exercise taking them for walks too.

This only applies to dogs, because as everyone knows, all other domestic animals (especially cats) are shit.

As a dog owner I make sure I pick up our dogs’ poo in handy bags bought from Wilko. They’re scented bags, so when your finger bursts through the tissue-thin plastic you get a smell of roses to accompany the canine excrement under your fingernails.

Not everybody does this though, which leads to the keepers of man’s best friend to be treated with the same level of contempt by non-owners as cyclists are by motorists.

“I’ve seen someone’s dog pooing in that long grass,” my neighbour said one day when I came back from the park. “If a kid’s ball went in there, they could get shit in their eyes!”

How do people look for a lost ball exactly? I would personally remain standing and look around a bit, but he seems to be of the opinion that you should crawl into the long grass on your stomach with your face pressed against the floor.

His reaction was dramatic, to say the least, but his gripe about some people not picking up after their animal was fair.

On Facebook, someone had seen some dog muck on the pavement. Horror of horrors, it was near a school.

“What if a child had stood in it!” a Facebooker raged, although none of the words were spelled correctly.

I imagine it would be the same as if an adult stood in it – unpleasant and messy. Again though, it shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

I took our dogs through town one Saturday, only for one of them to have the hugest, runniest shit of all time in the middle of the pavement on the high street. I still scooped it up. She didn’t even have the decency to look ashamed for causing me so much embarrassment.

Unfortunately, our friends with the long grass dumper and the school pavement defecator have ruined it for the rest of us. Now if someone sees you with a dog and sees any shit at all within a mile radius, they’ll automatically assume your animal is the culprit and roll their eyes at you. The fact that you’re carrying two bags full of freshly produced dogs’ eggs won’t dissuade them either.

It’s not dog owners who are to blame, it’s lazy dog owners. If they can’t be arsed to pick up turds, can they be arsed to feed their pet properly or take it to the vet when it’s ill? Probably not. They’re also the kind of people who generally don’t care about anyone but themselves.

You wouldn’t have a gigantic crap at home and not flush it - unless it was a particularly spectacular one you wanted to show to other people, although that’s what Instagram is for - so get rid of your dog’s too. The streets and parks are blessed with these magical things called “bins” into which you can deposit your flimsy bags, and they’re free to use.

Anyway, I reckon that poo outside the school was done by a cat. Sneaky bugger.