way too much alliteration for anyone's sake

[spatch]

While hanging out with jodied on Sunday waiting for the Boston Massacre to happen, I made the acquaintance of a very friendly yellow lab puppy who was excitedly sniffing the crowd. He made friends with a young girl, who peppered the puppy's papa with the usual questions: What's its name? How old is it? Can I pet it?

Then she pointed at the plastic leash housing, with baggie canister attached, and said "What's that?" The guy point-blank answered "That holds the bags to put his poop in." Slightly disgusted, the little girl backed away slightly from the canister, which made the guy laugh. "Owning a dog's not so glamorous anymore, is it?"

(Remember that Cat Owner Truth I mentioned a few laughs ago? Yeah.)

Some people still haven't grasped this, though, and I am specifically thinking about the woman at Petsmart last night. I'd gone to get food for Mr. The Cat and was happily hanging out in one extra-long line while the sole cashier was trying in vain to look up the product code for crickets. Now you know what it's like at the big pet stores; you're welcome to bring your beasties in and there's training programs every night (last night was puppy city) and people running around with obedience clickers and whatnot. The pet store staff knows animals and knows what animals like to, well, do.

So I'm still stymied by the behavior of the woman who brought in the cute little terrier, dragging him along the shiny polished linoleum floor. Doggy was excited, doggy saw all kinds of new people and smelled new smells and saw other dogs and doggy was just so excited, he couldn't contain himself. I only noticed because the woman noticed.

"Uh oh!" she said sharply and self-consciously, as she tarried near an endcap. Looking both ways, she tightened her grip on the leash and moved on along, dragging the pup behind her. There was a little yellow puddle next to the endcap.

Now it happens. Pups pee in Petsmart. It happens. The staff works with animals all day, they are not going to scream and holler in the event of an accident. Yet the speed at which the woman fled the Quote Scene Of The Crime Unquote led me to believe she wasn't exactly about to go inform someone of what happened.

And, lo and behold, she apparently didn't, because it took someone in my checkout line to alert a staff member to the accident. And they quickly took care of it.

You'd think someone who walks their dog all the time would be used to this. You own the animal, you clean up after it. Running away from the pee ain't gonna make it go away, lady.

And something tells me she don't walk around with little baggie canisters, either.

Comments

[luckimunki.livejournal.com]

Some dog owners are really awful about this. When I worked in the animal hospital, people would sometimes stand and watch as their dog peed on the floor (when the door to the outside world of Pee Wherever You Like was a mere two feet to their left) and then either pretend it didn't happen, or order me to get some paper towels to clean up their dog's mess. Vet waiting room =/= Dog toilet. KTHXBYE.

[slit.livejournal.com]

My mom did that in a store once. Only it wasn't a dog, it was my sister.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

AHAHAHA oh god, she's going to kill you if she reads this. (where IS she anyway?)

[spatch]

You have won the LiveJournal for today.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

I have two cats in the house. There is no box of shit. There is doubtless a great deal of catshit neatly buried under hedges in the surrounding fields, but this knowledge causes me no great torment. Observe your Cat Owner Truth sizzle in the all-consuming pyre of my counterexample!

Soon, however, I will be in a place with a garden frequented by black bears, and a shitbox will become a necessity. So I guess you win in practise, even if your All X Are Y statement goes poof.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Meh, go read customers_suck if you want some wacky stories about what people let their children get away with in stores (or if you just want to lose all your faith in humanity at once). I think it's more an epidemic of 'if I get away fast enough it's someone else's problem' coupled with 'oh, the underclass wage slaves who work here will clean it up, it's their job'.

Retail chains encourage that latter kind of thinking by spoiling customers and taking any abuse or bad behaviour the customers want to dole out. They might (gasp) lose a sale if they did something like provide handy mops with signs asking people to please clean up after their own pets.

[mybadhairlife.livejournal.com]

When I was a wage slave in the clothing department of a big store, we used to regularly find dirty diapers stashed in the display bins and our dressing rooms. This store had bathrooms, but people were just too damn lazy to walk there.

Our giant Pet$smart has clean up stations all over the store, and people still let their dogs pee and run. Jerks.

[redtheblue.livejournal.com]

I read this post and was all of a sudden mad at Bush, a hundred cartoon ideas flashing before my eyes. Urgh, it's too early.