Читать книгу The Dodo Collection - Steve Stack - Страница 36

White Dog Poo

I am willing to bet that few entries in this book will get readers (of a certain age, at least) more nostalgic than this collection of paragraphs on dog shit.

The younger ones among you may find this hard to believe, but mention those three magic words to anyone over the age of 35 or so, and their eyes will glaze over, a strange smile will cross their lips, and they will be transported down memory lane to summer days of yesteryear when the nation’s pavements were littered with canine fragrant parcels baking quietly in the hot sun.

You still see a lot of dog shit around these days, and frankly the culprits – or, more correctly, the culprits’ owners – should be taken outside and shot, but the offending pile is usually a shade of brown. This was not always the case. There are no statistics available (which is a further outrage), but my completely unscientific method (which involves casting my mind back and having a guess) would suggest that around 30% of crap on the pavement pre-1985 was white.

Here’s the science bit: dogs used to eat a lot more bone and bone-meal in days gone by. A dog with a bone is a classic image, but you don’t actually see it in real life all that much any more. Bones, as any school kid knows, have lots of calcium in them, and white dog poo was basically the calcium left behind when all the other component parts of the turd had evaporated, been eaten by flies, or otherwise broken down.

We are also, as a nation, a lot more disciplined about picking up after our dogs, so steaming piles of doings are rarely left on the pavement for long enough to turn into ghost-like versions of themselves.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Sort of.

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