Dog Rescues and Snow Jobs

Photo from Wikipedia Commons

I enjoy hiking, but I haven’t been doing it as much as I’d like.  New year’s resolutions have never been my thing, but goals are. When the calendar rolled over to 2022, I decided to sign up for the 52 Hike Challenge to prioritize hiking in my regular routine and give me a new goal to work on. I honestly think the “challenge” is a genius way to leverage the power of social media to sell medals worth 50-cents for $65, but it’s better than Wordle if it gets me out from behind a screen.

Last weekend, snow was forecast for Sunday, so I planned to do my hike—my 5^th of the year so far—on Saturday. A birthday party and an intense Minecraft session afforded me a couple hours of mom-duty reprieve, so I grabbed my trekking poles and headed to a new-to-me trail nearby. I had only gotten a few hundred yards from the parking lot, when I met up with another hiker walking a dog in the opposite direction. I said “Hi there! Pretty dog!” and she replied “Thanks, he’s a Rescue.” A little container of black plastic doggie-poo bags jangled from the handle of her leash as we both continued on our way.

That description always strikes me funny. A Rescue.  Where “rescue” is a noun, not a verb. A couple of years ago, while my family was around the dinner table, the kids were discussing their day at school.

“Carter got a dog!” my oldest son shared about a classmate.

“Oh, neat, what kind?” I inquired.

“He said it was a Rescue.”

“What’s a Rescue?” asked our youngest.

I replied that it is when people bring an animal with questionable lineage or unsuitable homes into their families to love, and that by doing so, it saves them from an uncertain future.

My husband quickly interjected, “You know kids, kinda like how Mommy did with me.” Ha, my husband, my little Rescue.  He’s not entirely wrong, but I mostly call him Joe.

I can’t knock the concept: shelter, love, and nurture the unwanted, but God Bless if my sanctimonious trigger doesn’t peg out when I hear it. Is it even a Rescue if the owner doesn’t proactively talk about it? “I shall inform thee of mine altruism!” It’s like Crossfit, but for dog people. Someone save me if I ever meet a Crossfitting-Rescue owner, and Lord help us all if they’re into crypto. Maybe they think “Mutt,” “Mix,” or “Heinz 57” offends the dogs? When I was a kid, one of my dad’s hunting dogs had surprise puppies. We found them homes with an ad in the classifieds stating that the mom was a Brittany, and the dad came from a good neighborhood. I don’t believe anyone was offended, and we still laugh about it to this day.

This canine nomenclature was still on my mind as I hiked off down the path. I didn’t pass another soul and enjoyed my time alone breathing in the humid air that was hinting at the upcoming snow. About a mile down the trail, I came across a small black plastic bag with a knot tied in the top. It was a loaded doggie-doo bag, un-weathered, and freshly left right on the trail! I assumed it came from the same lady I had spoken to not twenty minutes before. This is actually not uncommon in hiking—seeing bagged up dog waste on trails—I’d just never encountered it where I could likely connect the pouch to the person who left it.

It is possible that she dropped it unknowingly, after all, she was the kind of gal who owned a Rescue! However, there is no way that all the errant doggie bags left along hiking trails are accidental. In an activity that espouses the principles of Leave No Trace, I’m reasonably confident most of my fellow hiking brethren would never leave empty plastic bags intentionally on a trail, but I’m worried their minds have short-circuited into allowing them to behave as if their dog’s dookie somehow absolves the plastic from being…plastic. Way to half-ass it, America. “Responsible dog owners clean up after their pets!” has somehow morphed into “This litter is proof of what a good dog owner I am!” Public relations supporting the hiking community and environmental stewardship clearly pale in comparison with the effectiveness of the pet care marketing industry.

CDC recommendations actually advise using bags in picking up after pets. They also include following up with proper disposal. The objective is to avoid introducing pathogens into the natural environment, not to bow to the Dog-Gods and performatively bag their crap. The fact that we have a government agency that has issued recommendations regarding pet waste disposal blows my mind, but it should be of no surprise to anyone that — like pandemic guidance — these recommendations are both lacking and somewhat ignored. Maybe the CDC and the EPA should get together on this one.

Full disclosure: I left the bag where it was. It was a loop hike, and my plan was to finish the loop and grab the poop. By the time I circled back around, someone else had done the honors. Trail Magic! I really would have picked it up, but I was also relieved I didn’t have to sherpa Rescue’s doo-doo for a mile. He was a rather large dog.

It did snow the next day, and my kids had a blast. They were outside from 11 in the morning until after 8 that night. They didn’t even come into eat. I just threw food out the door and hoped for the best. A whopping 1 1/2 inches of wet southern snow that mostly melted upon contact soaked through the hand-me-down-trade-around winter clothes my friends and I had exchanged to bundle our collective children.  I think I ran three loads of laundry drying wet clothes and getting cold mud out of snow pants.

Like all good card-carrying moms from the tony suburbs, I snapped the obligatory “Snow Day” pictures and posted them online.  My kids had gone sledding and used beach shovels to build a rather sad looking fort. They also had contests to see who could roll the biggest dirt-covered snowball down the slide at the playground. That night I scrolled through my feed with a glass of Pinot checking out everyone else’s snow day fun and chili recipes.

One of my friends a couple neighborhoods over had posted similar pictures of her own daughters’ smiling red faces sledding down subdivision landscaping on a thin layer of wet snow and dead Bermuda grass. In one of the pictures, she had used the edit feature on her phone to circle a green plastic lump in the muddy snow behind the pink sled as it careened down the hill in front of her house. With her finger, she drew an arrow pointing to the lump and labeled it: Poop Bag.

Thank goodness her neighbors are good pet owners. They probably have Rescues, too.

The picture was such a fantastic example of the conundrum that is America: a society so moved to care for animals that we prove it by wrapping biodegradable matter in hydrocarbons to leave on the neighbor’s lawn. And then we post pictures of it online. Wait until the climate change people see this. They’ll probably just scratch ole Rescue’s belly and call him a good dog.  I swear those pet marketing people have got game.  I silently mashed the “laughing” emoji on the photo and made a mental note to stick to the dog free trails.  Its not that I don’t like dogs; it’s their owners that drive me nuts. Five down, forty-seven to go.