There’s a commercial on our local radio stations urging dog owners - via a little ditty - to pick up our dog’s poop. One of the reasons the singer thinks we should pick up poop is to keep it out of the water supply.
Now, I am all for picking up poop and I never have the dog out of the house without at least 2 empty bags. But lots and lots of animals poop outside, and I’ve never heard of issues with their poop getting into the water supply. Is dog poop somehow different, or did they just need more fodder for their song?
Curiously, there are also commercials playing for this summer’s new exhibit at the zoo - “The Scoop on Poop” (all about animal poop). The exhibit is sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.
Roundworm eggs can live for years in dirt and can be a serious zoonotic disease when little kids are involved. That’s more a concern for the shore over the water, though. Smaller parasites that would affect the water supply like giardia or crypto would be more likely to come from wildlife or farm animals. Though we are seeing more and more giardia in puppies these days.
Are you near some body of fresh water that’s used for the drinking water supply?
Around here, there are signs about picking up dog poop as the storm sewers flow directly to the lake, so indeed, some amount dog poop will get into the water supply. (As well as general dirt, oil, brake and tire dust and everything else that gets onto a road.)
I think the biggest issue is the sheer number of dogs there are. According to this cite, there are something like 72 million dogs in the U.S., and the vast majority are pooping outside somewhere. I’m pretty certain that there are far more domestic pets than there are wild animals of comparable size.
Any animal feces near public water supplies can be an issue, though, not just dogs. Besides dogs, another animal that gets attention are Canadian geese, which tend to congregate in parks and golf course, and deposit tons of green poop that makes its way into nearby water bodies.
Dog (or other animal) poop isn’t really likely to ‘get into the water supply’. At least, not directly or in any significant proportion.
The water supply tends to come from municipal wells or rivers or lakes, and is then filtered, fluoridated, chlorinated, etc. to ensure that is is safe for drinking. Poop ends up in surface waters, where it is greatly diluted and then washed downstream.
The swimming beach 2 blocks from me has been closed for a couple of weeks. Because the damn Canada Geese poop all over the banks of Minnehaha Creek, and then when there is a heavy rain, that’s all washed into the creek and downstream to this lake, the last one along the creek. But that’s just the swimming beach. Our water supply comes from much further upstream. That doesn’t affect the drinking water supply (at least, not ours – it may affect them downstream in Iowa).
Try that line on the 400,000 residents of Milwaukee who got sick with cryptosporidium infections from the water supply in 1993 - especially the families of the 54 people who died.
I dunno, seems like the amount of dog/cat waste in the world would be miniscule to the waste of all other mammals, but if nothing else, nobody wants to have to look at your dog doo. Or drink it, I suppose.
I don’t think everyone here appreciates how many domestic dogs there are. As I mentioned above in my earlier cite, there are over 72 million dogs in the U.S. alone. Dogs have done very well by allowing themselves to be domesticated.
Also, unlike wild animals off in the wilderness, domestic dogs, by definition, live near people and our water supplies.
As animal size gets bigger, you generally have fewer of them in the environment. For example, there are only a few dozen moose here in Connecticut and a few hundred bears. The only other large animals in Connectiuct are deer, and granted, there are several hundred thousand deer in Connecticut. Nevertheless, I still think there more dogs.
According to this cite, there are approximately 77.5 million domestic dogs in the U.S., and 39% of U.S. homes own at least one dog. Crunching some numbers, I estimate there are about 750,000 domestic dogs in Connecticut, which is more than all the large wildlife here combined. That’s a lot of pet waste.
OK, let’s look at it this way: That’s about one dog for every four humans (which we’ll assume have the same population distribution that humans do). And let’s say that an average dog produces about half of the poop of an average human. So in any given location, there will be about an eighth as much dog poop produced as human poop.
But the human poop (almost) all goes into an extensive sewer system designed explicitly for dealing with poop, while the dog poop (almost) all just goes onto the ground somewhere. Consider the city where you live, and ask yourself: If this city had only a tenth as much population as it does, would it still need a sewer system, or would it be clean enough if all the inhabitants just went on the ground?
Looked at that way, it really does seem important to clean up all that dog poop.
Most folks who clean it up put it in the trash, which means it ends up in the landfill. Is that any different than just leaving it in the yard? Just wondering.
If it’s in the landfill it won’t leach into the watershed at all - it’ll just compost. Assuming that your landfill isn’t already an ecological disaster causing water and soil contamination.