02 AugHappy Birthday, Pooper Scooper Law!

Forty years ago today, this city got a whole lot cleaner. Today is the anniversary of the Pooper Scooper law, which made it illegal to leave your dog's poop where plops. It was the first law of its kind in the USA. The campaign to clean up the streets of excrement began when Fran Lee, an Upper West Side activist, started drawing attention to a purported link between feces on sidewalks and child blindness. What followed was something of a waste-management creativity renaissance: enthusiasts wrote up plans for everything from sidewalk dog toilets to poop-freezing sprays to city-funded “enviromaids” employed to pick up after dogs. If you're into dogs, NYC, and esoteric legal history, I highly suggest picking up the best (well, perhaps only) book on the topic,  New York's Poop Scoop Law: Dog, The Dirt, And Due Process, by Michael Brandow. 

Ultimately, the solution was a simple mandate: Pick up after your dog. Many scoffed at the thought. My dad was among the dissenters. But, one day in the early 1980s when we were out together in SoHo with our dog Mabel, she went, we walked away, and then a stranger shouted at us for not picking it up. That moment changed everything.

Back then, our excrement removal routine depended on something once commonly found in most households: newspaper. Indeed, Fran Lee, the anti-poop crusader, specifically suggested people use newspapers for this purpose. It was an exciting time for print media. Here, she demonstrates various tools to be used for cleaning up after one’s dog. Her personal favorite? The New York Times.

Today, of course, we have much more nuanced ways of picking up after our dogs. My own personal mission has been to make the process a bit more… interesting. I mean, back when we used papers, we could actually gain some information from the thing we used to get the stuff from the ground to the garbage. But… good luck reading a plastic poop bag you've just torn off a roll. The most successful effort towards somehow reviving the joy of the print medium with the chore of cleaning up after dogs has been my Donald Trump Poop Bag collection, which features a caricature by my late father, Robert Grossman, who, before he started doing caricatures for poop bags, indeed did caricatures for The New York Times.

If we have to have Trump as president, and we have to daily do the unpleasant chore up picking up poop… well, sometimes two wrongs make a right.