City adds more garbage cans to parks to encourage more dog owners to pick up after their pets

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It never fails. You lace up your walking shoes and hit the trails of our city parks. You walk a few kilometres and then you're pooped.

Oh, you could probably keep walking for hours in the fresh air and beauty of these first blushes of spring.

It's your shoes that get pooped -- usually all inside their tread where you will spend an hour with a stick to scrape out the ick but still smell it for a week.

We all love our doggies, but let's face it, they're a species known for feces. And with spring starting to melt down upon us, our fertile green spaces have turned to liquid fertilizer. On some of our trails there's enough caca and poo to smother a cockapoo.

It's not Fido's fault of course. A dog's gotta doo what a dog's gotta doo. Rover can't read the park signs prescribing the proper process of the poo-pickup practice. Dogs don't know their vowels from their bowels, their consonants from their constitutionals.

The problem is some dogs' human friends.

They're the ones who can and should read the signs asking people to clean up after their pets. Most dog owners, nearly all dog owners, do the right thing and give the phrase "doggie bag" a whole new meaning. The problem lies with those who don't.

Rod Higgins, the city's director of green spaces, acknowledges it's an ongoing concern, and notes there are peaks and valleys throughout the year -- those peaks and valleys both a description of the piles and the number of complaints that pile-up.

As part of the solution, Higgins said the city is in the process of distributing some more garbage cans at key points in the parks. It appears some dog owners start with good intentions, but eventually tire of carrying their doggie bags when there are no trash cans to be found.

There is a philosophical issue to consider. You don't want a nature park clogged with trash receptacles at every turn in the trail, plus crews also have to go out to empty the cans on a regular basis. But while the city tries to encourage the pack-in pack-out concept familiar to those who use our national parks, Higgins said he still recognizes the need to deal with all people the way they are, not how we wish they were.

The city also has dispensers of bags for dog owners to use, should they forget to bring their own, though vandalism of the dispensers can be a problem.

"The doggie bags for the most part work," Higgins said, adding his staff would rather have to occasionally pick a bunch of empty bags up off the ground than deal with the alternative.

The dog droppings, in great enough quantities, represent both a health and aesthetic problem, Higgins said.

He also would like to remind people that the city's bylaw enforcement officers do occasionally patrol the parks.

Bylaw infractions carry fines ranging from $50 to $1,070.