The Poop Faerie

   The crazier this gets, the more fun it is. I have to get with my friend Autumn for some of her awesome artwork:-)

   I have yet another character for you guys:  The ever-elusive Poop Faerie. She has actually been around for a long time, but only in fantasy and lore. Even so, it would seem there are plenty of folks who maintain an unwavering faith in her existence. She is the one that cleans up all the dog poop left behind by owners who can't be bothered. More recently, she has been enlisted to clean up the many piles of bagged poop left behind as well. As this is a relatively new development, she has had to develop new strategies, but as a magical creature she's catching up fast.

   She's a godsend, really, to everyone who has always felt that they were too good to clean up after their dog. She cleans up the piles left on the sides of paths (because if the dog doesn't actually poop on the path, it's like it doesn't count, right?), and she cleans up that hard to reach poop too (though I suspect if it were a 20-spot and not dog poop, owners would find a way to reach it;-). The Poop Faery is the one who most often cleans up after small dogs too. For some reason that I can't quite understand, they seem to be her most frequent customers in my area. Maybe it doesn't count because it's so small? Or because the same folks who like small, fuzzy dogs are too delicate to clean poop? Who knows. It doesn't matter, because fortunately, the Poop Faerie has got your back;-)

   I go out for my morning walk and see colorful bags filled with poop lining the path. I smile knowingly to myself, because I have faith that the Poop Faerie will soon be along to collect the bags. How nice that dog-owners thought to at least bag it up. Why do more when there's a Poop Faerie to do the rest, after all. And we all know it's MUCH better to step in small-dog poop than big-dog poop. That's just a big 'duh'! And if it's hard to reach or you happen to be looking in the opposite direction when your dog 'does it's business', well, you can't be held responsible for that, right? If you didn't see it happen, it doesn't end up in the groundwater. EVERYBODY knows that. And if you go through the trouble of bagging it up and throwing it in the general direction of a dumpster, it doesn't really matter if it ends up inside it or not. Near it is close enough; why take the extra five steps to make sure the bag gets put into the trash? And what does it matter when the Poop Faery is out doing such an efficient job cleaning up after dogs everywhere? It's not like it's the owner's responsibility to clean up after their dog. That would just be ridiculous.

   It would seem the Poop Faerie is the most active in the spring when the snow melts. It's as though the dog-owning public collectively decided that if it can be buried in snow, it doesn't need to be picked up. Snow is forever, after all, and if nobody saw you bury it, it never really happened. So many rules to remember! But as always, the Poop Faerie swoops in to save the day from what could have been a really nasty mess. Phew!

   What would the world be like without the Poop Faerie? What a mess that would be! All those bags of poo left by the side of the path would just stay there indefinitely; piles of dog poop would create mine fields and end up on the bottoms of shoes. We would all have to smell it on a warm day. Conscientious dog-owners who pick up after their own dogs (crazy!) would have to deal with the consequences of an angry community fed up with the folks who won't clean up. What a horrible scene that would be!

Thank goodness for the Poop Faerie!