Before my sister bludgeoned my parents into buying her a dog, we were a family of dog haters; my dad only ever referred to the animals as “shitting machines.”
Now, I know it’s not the dogs’ fault, and that responsible dog owners pick up the canine faeces and dispose of it properly, but if I’d been in possession of an air-rifle this afternoon, while I was retching and scraping away at the sole of my shoe, anything with four legs would have been fair game.
As bird owners we are so used to being covered in parrot crap that we don’t even think about it. Michele will even pick it up in her hards! But dog shit is different. The dog that laid today’s daffy clearly has similar bowel trouble to me, and I do everything I can to ensure that my own waste products are rapidly dispatched to a safe distance as soon as possible. So finding my knackered old shoe, and the base of my trousers, covered in foul smelling slop really did nothing to improve my mood.
Did you know dog crap can send you blind ? I suppose it’s a blessing that my shoe copped it rather than some young kid, with which the park was packed, gaily roly-polying through it. But even so, I still had to get it off and so effectively smeared it through much of my path out of the park. Disgusting.
In all honesty my shoes needed a bloody good replacing anyway, but it was still embarrassing to have to take them off and dump them in a bin, by a busy bus-stop and then walk home in my socks…like a total nob.
