The Economics of Dog Squeeze

I thought we’d talk about something a bit different today. Dog sh*t. And we’re going to approach it from an academic perspective, considering both the economic and legal issues. I’m not sure what it reveals about my personality to admit that this is a topic of great interest to me, but nevertheless I’m curious to see (a) if the personal finance community that comprises the readership of this blog also has strong feelings about the issue, and (b) if so, whether the community has a similar or dis-similar perspective to mine. (On this second point I’m also running a test to see if I can draw out some comments; the data from the Internets tells me that I’ve got plenty of readers of this blog, but I don’t get many comments. I am betting that an opinionated discussion of pets and private property rights will stir the sh*t, so to speak.)

The Sh*tty Issue

So here are the sh*tty facts: Our house sits on a corner lot in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood; the average price-point is probably around $600k right now. The sidewalk is on our side of the street, so it cuts a swath right through my yard, and I have a strip of grass about two feet wide between the sidewalk and the curb. And because we decided way back during our income fire-hose days to live in a fancy neighborhood where you are required to do some amount of keeping up appearances, we have a lush, green lawn that I have to pay some company to come and spray with chemicals once a month (not to mention my sweat equity of cutting, trimming, etc.). 

Here is a formula that you should be aware of: suburban neighborhood + sidewalk + lush green grass = loads of dog sh*t. People walk their dogs all day long on the sidewalk in front of our house (a corner lot like ours has twice the sidewalk frontage), and these animals by all appearances love taking huge dumps in our soft grass. (Footnote thought: don’t you people have jobs that you should be trapped in every day?) And for now I will forego discussing the buckets of dog piss that spray everywhere, except to say that I’ve had to pay someone to repair part of our brick mail-box because the mortar had eroded from years of golden showers. 

OK, so (dog) sh*t happens. Why discuss it here? Answer: because in this situation the sh*t is completely preventable, and I’m perplexed as to why everyone else doesn’t see it the same way. My world-view is one of rigid (but not necessarily rugged) individualism. It seems fairly obvious to me that I should take care of my crap and you should take care of your crap (literally and figuratively). The world would operate very efficiently this way. And this philosophy partly explains why we don’t have dogs. Everyone in the JF Household loves dogs, but they simply cost too much in terms of time, effort, responsibility, and money. We want to be able to leave town without having to find a dog-sitter or other boarding solution. We don’t want to have to go outside in the freezing rain at 11 pm to let the dog empty out. We don’t want to deal with house-breaking, chewed up furniture and shoes, and pools of piss on the kitchen floor. And finally: I don’t want to have to figure out where my Great Dane is going to drop his Great Dumps twice a day. Because I sure as hell don’t want them in my yard—our kids roll around in this grass—and it wouldn’t be fair for me to bring him into your yard to drop his massive dog-bombs. 

So that’s it. Our calculation with respect to dogs is: COST OF DOGS > BENEFIT OF DOGS = DON’T GET DOGS. Reasonable people will disagree over the output of this calculation in their personal situation, but surely we can all agree that each of us has the unfettered right to make that decision for ourselves. But here is the market-distorting problem: a lot of people who have dogs are doing the calculation wrong. They are under-estimating the cost side of the calculus. How so? They are pushing part of their cost of dog ownership onto the Joe Freedom Household. 

The Law Regarding Dog Sh*t

I wasn’t a dog-sh*t attorney in my former life, but I still feel reasonably qualified to discuss the legal issues here. And ultimately I believe this issue must be resolved on social and economic grounds rather than legalities, so this is really just for informational purposes. 

Since we live in a wonderful country that offers strong protections for privately owned property, including real property, I could resolve this problem in my favor by leveraging the law. I could post “NO TRESPASSING” signs all across our yard, including a few cartoons of hunched-over dogs with a line through it (see at left), and then seek to enforce my private property rights against anyone who decided to make their problem my problem by trespassing and letting their dog drop a deuce in my grass. Even if they did the more-polite thing and picked up the crap with an inside-out grocery bag, it would constitute a trespass. I could bring blades of grass with left-over residue in to court as Exhibit A. Pretty simple, but a lot of effort. Oh, and along the way I’d likely become a local pariah because apparently most of the people in my neighborhood staunchly support private property rights only up to the point where it means that they would have to figure out what to do with their own dog sh*t. Then not so much. 

The sidewalk that cuts across my deep green grass and that is the vector for dog squeeze in my lawn is constructed on top of a legal right that the county possesses called an easement or public right-of-way. That means that the county has a limited right to use part of my privately owned real property to construct a sidewalk (or bury utility lines, etc.) that are used in their public mission. The county can use their easement right to build the sidewalk, and it also grants to the general public the right to walk across that sidewalk. But it doesn’t give the public the right to trespass on the surrounding (non-easement-subject) real property, or to leave detritus on the sidewalk itself. So the point here is: don’t confuse the public right-of-way that is used to construct the sidewalk and allow for general pedestrian traffic to equate to a right to leave piles of sh*t on someone else’s property. That’s not how it works. 

While I could wage a legal battle to protect my pristine hard-earned green grass, I’ve decided that it isn’t worth it. The calculation here is: COSTS OF LEGAL BATTLE > BENEFITS OF LEGAL BATTLE = NO LEGAL BATTLE. If it were just me living in this community solo, I might start a dog-squeeze court-room battle royale just for entertainment—as you know by now, I don’t care much what other people think—but I do have a family here and Mrs. JF tells me that she’s not so keen on this idea. 

One more note on the law here. While our society takes no notice of dogs squatting in lawns all the time, if you try taking a doke on your neighbor’s lawn while out for a jog, you could be subject to criminal prosecution for public indecency and apparently something called “public defecation,” at least in Colorado. So I don’t recommend taking this type of action to prove a point (something that I will admit that I previously considered . . . dropping trou in an offending dog-owner’s yard and just smiling and waiving as they looked on.)

The Economics of Dog Sh*t 

Imagine the results in a world where your neighbor could simply walk into your house and take some of your hard-earned cash to use for his drug habit, simply because he didn’t want to spend his own. And in this hypothetical world the community has developed in a way to not only allow this type of behavior, but where it is the norm. Cost/benefit and cause/effect connections would be broken; incentives to change undesirable behavior would be warped and perverted. Chaos would result. 

We have something similar in concept taking place with dog sh*t. If every dog owner in my neighborhood was required to go through a rigorous analysis of determining WHERE his dog would dump—and knowing that he couldn’t push this negative externality onto me or anyone else without their express permission—his decision would be more difficult, and he may decide that his costs would exceed his benefit. Or maybe not. But every single day, highly educated, reasonable individuals here in Freedomville are deciding that they have the right (and that it’s socially acceptable) to enter onto my lawn and allow their dog to crap in huge heaps. And these are the same people that will waive and smile when they see us out in the yard with the kids playing, or me slogging through the rows on Saturday with the lawn mower. In fact, it is clear that these offenders KNOW that what they are doing is wrong BECAUSE YOU NEVER SEE THEM DO IT. They never walk up to you for a chat and smile whilst their St. Bernard lays down some soft serve. This stuff just appears in the yard . . . out of nowhere. I’ve even seen some individuals carry a poo-bag just for cover: they don’t use it unless they see you through the window, and then they move to make a half-hearted attempt to pick up the junk. 

Here’s my favorite story. One day last fall I was cleaning up the yard and I noticed a small pile of pine straw on the sidewalk in front of the house. I was moving quickly picking up various yard waste and swiftly bent down to pick up the pile to return it to an island. And boom! I shoved my hand right into a warm, steaming pile of dog squeeze. Someone had not only shat on the sidewalk, but then affirmatively acted to cover it up with pine straw. Awesome. (The best part was when a nearby neighbor came running over after hearing my highly-audible-yet-mild profanity.) Wouldn’t the world be a wonderful place if everyone acted like this bandit?

I get it: nobody likes picking up dog shi*t. I don’t. You don’t. And then having to carry it around with you for a mile on a 90-degree day is no walk in the park. But here is a fact: someone must bear the cost of your decision to acquire and maintain dogs. Should it be me? Or you? 

A couple of additional thoughts and anticipated counter-arguments are appropriate. Yes, I do know that there are plenty of dog-owners that militantly pick up their detritus. You are a responsible, rational-thinking person that probably also believes in rigid individualism. Thank you. I’m not directing the bulk of these comments toward you. But even you, responsible sir, must understand that a lawn with mostly-cleaned-up dog squeeze is not the same as a lawn completely free of dog-shat residue. It just isn’t. I don’t know if you’re feeding your dog spicy enchiladas for breakfast or what, but you leave a mark. In fact, the episode that prompted this rant occurred just yesterday. While waiting at the bus stop (in my yard) and having a fascinating discussion with the 3-year-old boy that lives next door, he was rolling in the grass and almost went face-first into the remnants of waste from what must have been a Shetland Pony. It had been cleaned up—and probably more diligently than most efforts—but would have still led to a very bad outcome for my young friend had he hit the spot of the mostly de-fused land mine. 

In my former world of tax law, there is a legal concept called “internal consistency” that is applied in the analysis of whether an individual state’s tax regime is constitutionally invalid because it brings about the potential for multiple tax levies on the same income or activity. This internal-consistency analysis creates a hypothetical: if EVERY state enacted the same type of tax, would there be unfair multiple taxation of this particular income stream or activity. If yes, constitutional law will generally step in to invalidate the state tax. The logic here is beautiful in its simplicity: if every other state acted the way you are acting, Mr. New York, the world would be a really sh*tty place to live. So you need to change your behavior. The concept applies with equal force to dog sh*t. If your behavior as an irresponsible dog owner were implemented by everyone else, the world would be a very sh*tty place.

If your behavior fails the internal-consistency analysis with respect to dog shat (or anything else), maybe you should re-think it. 

Conclusions

We live in a society where for some reason that is unknown to me, we generally make everything more complicated than it needs to be. In this piece I am advocating a very simple and fair principle: manage your sh*t in a way that doesn’t impact me. I will do the same. If I pick up mine, and you pick up yours, how can that be a bad thing? What sense does it make to implement a system where we instead say: “you pick up mine (sometimes) and I will pick up yours (sometimes)  . . . but we won’t coordinate when that will happen or when I will pick up my own. I’ll just do whatever feels good that day.” That leads to a world where we’re all walking around in fear of stepping in someone else’s sh*t. And that’s a sh*tty way to live. 

Random footnotes

Sh*tty language: There’s more redacted profanity in this piece than usual. Sorry about that. I have a general policy of low or no profanity, but the subject matter at issue here seemed to necessitate a liberalization of the policy.

More complete thoughts on rigid individualism: My world-view as described in this piece is that we should all assume responsibility to take care of ourselves, to diligently manage our own affairs and problems, and to fervently avoid pushing our personal problems or costs on our friends, family, or society. I seek to militantly enforce this philosophy through my own actions on a daily basis. But there are times in life when all of us will need help no matter how hard we’ve worked, and no matter how diligent we have been in managing our own affairs. In these situations we should RUSH to help each other, and with a gracious attitude that expects no repayment. 

Application of dog-sh*t economics to the brewing retirement crisis: Does anyone else see the parallels between the way people are dealing with their dog sh*t and the way they are planning for their retirement or just their financial future in general? If your neighbor buys a Hummer—ok, that’s 15 years ago, today it’s a Range Rover—but hasn’t saved a penny for retirement or for his kids’ college education, is he necessarily the same kind of person that leaves dog squeeze in your yard? I think a compelling case can be made that yes, he is. Don’t be that guy. Don’t leave sh*t in your neighbor’s yard, and don’t spend your money in a way that assumes someone else will take care of your future obligations.  

Green-grass fetish? Yes, it’s clear that I have one. Take a second look at the mast-head above. For some reason I associate wide swaths of soft, green grass with freedom. And I’m interested in preserving freedom.