I’m rolling up the trail diligently distancing when my WTB Vigilante rips into an unseen boulder-sized package of poop and a full gob of discarded bio-weaponry sinks deep into the soft and sticky tentacles of my 2.8″ rubber. The stench is sickening. There’s something wildly wrong with doggy’s diet and I know the sinister crap stacker who black-bagged this bomb realized exactly the kind of odious atrocity they were depositing. Asshole!

Here we all are doing our darndest to stay away from moistly-mouth-breathing-mountaineers and in the meantime, your dog’s toxic waste is lining the trails waiting to fling up into my face. I’m a dad who’s also been around dogs for years so there’s no petulance about feculence here. Nope, the smell of deuces doesn’t generally get me in the dumps but this was a mound too far. I stopped. I cursed. I dug out Rover’s rancid rectal remains with a stick. It broke. I grabbed another stick. I mounted my bike, I rode around the corner, and I narrowly missed a carefully crafted cairn of crap. A three-bagger. Assholes! 

I’m so sick of this crap. No, you’re not going to “pick it up on [your] way back” just like the other one hundred bags of blockbuster bowel bundles I counted today aren’t simply waiting for their owner to finish hiking up to Burns Lake and back. And somehow, there’s been an exponential increase in excrement in the last few weeks. The sh*t-bags are dropping their sh*t bags everywhere!

The Poo Fairy doesn’t exist. Yet. I’ll let you hold on to Santa and the Easter Bunny but this one is straight discharge. And I’m not squatting down to pick it up unless I know with 100% certainly what car you drive. In which case, you’d better hope you have a locking gas cap.

I haven’t talked to a person enjoying any mountain in North Vancouver, including all the responsible dog owners I know, who hasn’t noticed the increase in bagged and un-bagged stool samples pooping up everywhere. Owning a dog is a barely regulated privilege and it stinks that some percentage of Lassie lovers won’t bag up the bio-mass. So you think a few clueless mountain bikers make the rest of us look bad? Imagine walking your dog past other owners’ obelisks of excrement.

Never mind the dogshit threat of a $100 fine. Never mind trying to budget for enforcement. Five minutes on a search engine will give you endless, location-specific, studies that all point to the same fact: if there is no witness to Froo Froo busting out a number two-two then some 40%+ of dog owners will just leave that sh*t. In this modern-day, you couldn’t swap all the articles written on this subject for a single roll of 2-ply. Danielle Baker wrote the preeminent piece on dog poop, pink eye, and the littering doo-bags with actual science in it, and do you think Squamish isn’t still flushed with feces?

In the face of owners that will not fulfill their responsibility to clean up, and haul out, their pet’s trail-side traps under any circumstances I’m dropping two possible solutions. Either, it’s time for dog owners to start a volunteer organization where the few pick up for the many – like mountain bike trail maintenance organizations except all you need is a spade and a bag – or, since that won’t happen, the time has come for a team of full-time Poop Fairies employed by land managers and financially fertilized by an increase to every dog owner’s yearly licensing fees.

It’s all about turds per time, sh*ts per shift, poop picked per period, and you best believe these poor people are going to need a living wage and plenty of sick-of-it days to pop ‘City Engineering – Trailside Turd Technician’ onto their resumes.
If you give a squat, be sure to ask all your candidates in the next municipal election where they sit on the subject of the Poop Fairy.