Off-leash areas were thought to have the most dog poop
How often don’t people in Calgary pick up after their pets? A group of researchers looked around in several parks and made an educated guess based on what they saw.
About 127 grams of dog poop are left behind per hectare per week in Calgary parks. This is the same as 169 poops per hectare over a six-month period. The city says that Calgary has more than 8,500 hectares of parks and other natural areas.
Alessandro Massolo and other researchers would put a stake in the ground at random places in city parks and use a 10-meter length of rope to plot out sites.
“We would define the area and then look for the poop of coyotes, dogs, and other animals in that area to figure out how much poop there was,” said Massolo, an associate professor in the biology department at the University of Pisa and one of the paper’s authors.
“We started to think, ‘Oh my God, this is a lot of poop,'” he said.
In 2011, both the data and the poop were collected. But a new paper gives people a look at what’s going on in the real world and something to think about.
Because, according to the research, not all parks are created, or treated, equally. Off-leash areas were thought to have the most dog poop..
Melanie Rock, who also worked on the paper and is a professor in the department of community health sciences at the University of Calgary, said that this could be because pet owners aren’t keeping as close an eye on their pets.
She also says that poo might not be picked up in off-leash areas because dogs have a natural instinct to hide when they do their business because it makes them vulnerable.
Parasites and diseases could be spread by dog poop
It’s not just gross to find poop in a park. Massolo also said that it could be bad for your and your dog’s health.
He has been studying a tapeworm that can infect humans, coyotes, foxes, and dogs. The tapeworm, which is sometimes calledEchinococcus multiloculariS, can give people a disease that looks like a tumor.
The tapeworm lays its eggs in the digestive systems of animals, so when a dog or other animal poops in a park, the eggs can find the perfect host, which Massolo says is usually a mouse. To finish the cycle, a dog will find an infected mouse and eat it. The dog will then bring the tapeworm back home.
Massolo said that when he lived in Calgary, he always kept a close eye on his dog, even when it wasn’t on a leash, because that’s where you could get this tapeworm.
WATCH | Here’s what scientists found about dog poop in parks:
As a social scientist, Rock has done other research on Calgary’s parks and how they are run by the community as a whole. She said that dog poop could be a source of trouble.
“That can make people feel like their neighbors don’t care about them and don’t treat them with respect,” Rock said.
With spring in the air, a trip to a park might show how much poop owners have left behind.
John Merriman, a community strategist with the City of Calgary’s parks and open spaces, said that feces aren’t on the city’s list of things to clean up in the spring.
Merriman said, “We just don’t have the time to go through all of the parks and off-leash areas; there are over 150 of them.” “At any time of year, we do count on dog owners to clean up after their pets.”
Merriman said that city workers and contractors do try to keep trash cans in parks in good shape, and that some places need to be cleaned out more often than others. But 311 reports are the best way to make sure parks don’t have trash bins that are full.
Merriman said the same thing about people who don’t clean up after their dogs.
Merriman said, “It’s hard for the people who enforce our community standards bylaws to catch someone in the act.” “If people tell us about parks where people don’t pick up trash, we’ll let our community standards group know and ask them to try to be more strict in that area,”
Even though Rock said that taking care of yourself is important, he also said that there is room for good deeds.
“As long as you’re in the park and have a plastic bag on hand, which could be anyone, I don’t think we should feel bad about picking up someone else’s dog poop,” said Rock.
The city can’t keep parks clean on its own
She also said that the city can only do so much to keep parks in good shape. A lot of what keeps a shared space clean is how much the people who use it care about it.
“In terms of the theme of the tragedy of the commons, which is that it’s hard to control a shared resource, these kinds of problems get worse the bigger the area is and the more authority or capacity is spread out,” she said.
Since the researchers looked at doo-doo, the City of Calgary has changed its law about being a responsible pet owner. It talked about how many dogs one person can bring to an off-leash area at once.
Rock said that their study could be a good starting point for finding out how this new policy changes things on the ground.
Rock said, “It won’t matter if people don’t think it’s something that can and should be fixed.”