Poop Karma
Chicago has a shit-uation. You know what I’m talking about. At least once or twice a day you’ll be out walking around and see a pile of dog shit that never got picked up. Your eyes narrow, your nose scrunches up, you huff and puff and think “ugh, who doesn’t pick up after their dog? That’s terrible!”
If this were a movie it would cut to me in Andersonville on a Tuesday morning in October 2020. It’s 5 am: I’m tired, I haven’t had coffee yet. I am freezing cold, yet beads of sweat are pouring down the small of my back, and I’m being dragged every which way by the eleven – yes you read that right, 11 – dogs on the pack walk.
And then it happens.
One dog starts its dance. I reach my free hand into my pocket. Nothing. A small shrug, no big deal, I go for the other pocket. The first dog squats, and another follows its lead. Now I frown, because the other pocket is empty too.
Another dog starts to poop, and I begin shaking my head as I pat down all my other pockets. My eyes widen and panic slowly spreads through my body as I realize every single one of these dogs is about to shit and I have ZERO poop bags on me.
How is that possible?
Now if you don’t know already, I am poop queen. A master pooper-scooper. There have been many, many times I have been without a poop bag and have used whatever I could find to serve as a substitute.
I look around. No litter on the ground, no stray poop bags tied to a fence, nothing. Complete and utter defeat.
So, since I – miss poop queen dog mom extraordinaire, the LEAST likely culprit of unscooped dog poop – have in the past BEEN that culprit, I really try to cut other people some slack. I like to imagine that maybe THEY found themselves in a similar situation to mine described above.
Maybe they, like me, planned on retracing their steps later that day to clean it up after the fact, but then got distracted and totally forgot about it. And then spent the next week stressing about it, awash with guilt and shame and remorse.
That’s why I practice poop karma.
This is a concept my lovely amazing wonderful friend Laura introduced to me. She is the OG three huskies crazy lady, and the actual main reason I adopted a third dog (Chester) when I did. She’s a badass and pretty much the strongest, most resilient person I know.
I lived in Minneapolis from 2012 – 2018 and it is where I became a dog mom. Laura and I would go to the off leash dog parks together because we both had huskies.
Literally every other human in the dog park would be walking the trails with their dogs trotting along right beside them, and our dogs were nowhere to be seen. They took off by themselves as soon as we let them in the gate, and we didn’t see them again for the next two hours. There was no way of knowing who pooped or where!
So what we did to make up for not picking up those unseen poops was pick up other random piles we saw. It’s a win-win! You are doing your part to help out, and you’re making up for any past / future instances of YOU not picking up poop!
I understand the idea of poop karma may sound disgusting to you. You may not want to have anything to do with it. I urge you to reconsider!
Next time you see a pile on the ground, and you have a spare poop bag, force yourself into some opposite action!
Just imagine me out on that fateful morning, with eleven poops and zero poop bags. Imagine pre-coffee Dorothy absolutely freaking out because she has to leave all those poops right where they were pooped.
Hopefully that will make you laugh, and then inspire you to pick it up.
There’s a song that goes along with it that really helps me when I’m doing it. Don’t worry, I will record myself singing it and share it so you can learn it too! I just know that was your next question. <3
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