As I’ve said before, I seem to spend a lot of time on this site writing about poop. Some people might see this as a metaphor for the life of a writer, rarely a very highly paid or respected profession, and some days I would agree with them.
Existential angst aside, though, people really do spend a lot of time figuring out how to deal with unwanted dog poop. Just last week, I wrote about the Kickstarter for Poo Pins. Last month, we had Océane Izard, who invented a machine that would power your household appliances using dog poop. And then there’s numerous reports of cities using DNA to track people who didn’t clean up behind their dogs.
While whimsical and kind of strange, all of those have to be more constructive approaches to dealing with wayward turds than the one used by John Robinson, who lives in the San Diego area of Southern California. Fed up with people who let their dogs drop poop on his lawn without cleaning it up, Robinson has dumped several pounds of chocolate chips into his yard. He says that it was an “experiment” to get people to avoid his property, and that it’s worked.
“They can walk on the other side of the street,” he told NBC News. “I am tired of it. People disrespect my yard; I’m tired of the stuff.”
His neighbors are less happy with his experiment. Some have even contacted the San Diego Animal Control complaining that he’s endangering their dogs. Resident Sarah Fisher, the owner of a Golden Doodle named Lucy, has been especially vocal and warns as many people as she can away from Robinson’s yard. She says that a lot of neighbors are worried about the threat to their dogs. “They’re scared of what he might do,” she told NBC. “If he is doing this – which is like an animal genocide – pretty much, he’s putting it out for animals to ingest and get sick.”
Robinson says that the chocolate poses no threat to the local dogs, although all dog lovers know that’s not true; chocolate can be toxic and even fatal to dogs. Still it begs the question: If the chocolate is so completely harmless, why use it in the first place?
What do you think? How would you handle a neighbor like Robinson? Does he have a right to be upset? And is the chocolate an extreme reaction?
Via NBC News
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