To most, the task of cleaning up after your dog, is not something to look forward to. But leaving dog poo in your yard is not a viable or safe option. Besides the obvious smell of pet waste, there are health risks from the bacteria that make it a real danger to others, especially to children and to other pets. Indeed, poo left in your yard is more than just a nuisance.
Dog feces may contain parvovirus, whipworms, hookworms, roundworms, threadworms, campylobacteriosis, giardia, and coccidia. Pet waste can spread parasites including E. coli, ringworms, tapeworms and Salmonella. Children's toys can come in contact with the waste and transferred to a child's body as children often bring their hands to their mouth, eyes and nose. Bacteria from the waste in your lawn can be picked up with bare feet years after the poo has disintegrated.
Dog poo can also be catastrophic to the water table. Rain will eventually break down the waste and spread contaminants into water sources. The Environmental Protection Agency classifies pet waste in the same category as toxic waste.
Despite some belief that dog poo is a good fertilizer, it is not. It is toxic to your lawn and creates brown spots and kills grass. The typical dog does the dooty twice a day. That's a lot of poo, depending on the size of your dog.
There are many types of solutions for removing pet waste from your property. Regardless of the solution, the poo needs to be deposited into a plastic bag for disposal. If not, it will smell bad, attract flies and create unsafe conditions wherever it is deposited.
One common Dog poo solution is using the ordinary poo-bag. This requires that the poo be grabbed with the bag in hand. The bag is then turned inside-out to be disposed of into a trash container. Obvious disadvantages to this method are that, you need to use your hand to grab the poo, hopeful that there is no hole in the bag. Most people find the idea of grabbing the poo in their hand to be a touch repulsive. Also this method allows only limited amounts of waste to be cleaned up with a single bag.
Another option is the poop scooper for dogs and bucket solution. Included in this pet waste cleanup option is the method of raking the poo into a shovel and transferring the poo into a bag. This can be an effective solution when there are days' worth of poo to clean up at once. Once again, the poo is transferred into a bag for disposal. This in itself does not sound bad, if there is no wind or otherwise perfect conditions for transferring poop from a shove into a bag.
There is also the "claw" solution which uses a device with "claw jaws" to grab the poo. The next step of course is to transfer the poo into the bag for disposal. This solution can be quite messy for transfer and also for cleanup. There is the chance that the poo will stick to the claw device and in the device's moving parts.
There are devices that use a vacuum system and others with a feature requiring an attached plastic grocery bag allowing for direct-to-bag cleanup option. No need to transfer the waste into a bag. A disadvantage to this is the required plastic bags are banned in many cities and in the entire state of Hawaii. In California grocery stores, you pay extra for choosing plastic bag over paper.
Our favourite is a device called PooBagger, which transfers the poo directly into an attached bag. ANY plastic bag including newspaper bags and all common poo-bags. It comes with an optional handle extension which screws into the device allowing for no bending over. No moving parts to break or get gunked up and no handling squishy bags. This product just makes the task easier.
