Our previous dog (Miser Dog) was so insanely bad around other dogs that we pretty much never walked him (he used a fenced-in dog run as his bathroom). But Prewash is great with people and beasts alike, and she learned to walk at heel so quickly that I've had a lot of fun walking her around the neighborhood.
This means that when we got her, for the first time in a decade, I had to think about how to clean up after my dog in other people's yards. It just so happens that, over the course of that same decade, I've tried to become a bit of a "no trash" freak, with a special emphasis on "no plastic". In fact, one of the small feats I keep patting myself on the back about is that I've convinced our newspaper carrier to stop wrapping our daily paper in plastic bags --- and yes, those are the same plastic bags that so many people tell me make "excellent dog poop bags".
It's true that we still seem to have an endless supply of plastic bags in our home. Even though we try to avoid it, we get random plastic bags wrapped around our produce, our cereal, Amazon items, etc. So there are still plastic bags in abundance that I could use for walking the dog, although admittedly some of them are odd and inconvenient shapes.
But I've discovered something I like way better than plastic bags, even better than plastic newspaper bags: newspaper. And the reason paper is better than plastic is this: when my dog squats, I slide a sheet of paper right where she's hunkered down, and the poop falls on the paper. Her mess doesn't get stuck the grass or anything like that. I then fold the paper over top of her mess, wrapping it in more paper if I'm going some distance, and carry it to the nearest trash can (or if we're close to home, I have a compost pile). I'm fortunate that our walk takes us past lots of trash cans, so I usually don't have to carry it far.
Clean up is so much easier than with a bag this way . . . I'm sort of amazed how nicely this works. And I like that this little package is entirely biodegradable.
Someone asked me, in as delicate a way as possible, whether the mess seeps through the paper. I have never had that happen yet. In fact, the wetter the poop is, the easier (by comparison to plastic) it is to pick up the mess from a lawn.
Here are two interesting (to me, at least) updates from when I originally posted this. We've done this for so long now, that when we go on walks, the sound of rustling newspaper is a cue to the dog that we're going to stop for a poop break -- so I've now trained her to poop on command, usually near a convenient public trash can. I think that's hilarious.
Now that we've moved, we no longer have a large yard that can host various compost piles. Dog poop and newspaper are both compostable, but the former is not supposed to be used in compost that goes in food gardens. We are super, super fortunate that our next door neighbors are the opposite of yard-proud, and they've allowed us to throw food scraps, stray leaves, and other compostable items over our fence into their yard. (There's a very large bush that shields the compost pile from the view of their house). This pile slowly rots into the ground, and doesn't add to the landfill burden.
And I know this is a gross subject, so I'll just stop here.
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