My dog doesn’t read your lawn signs - The Boston Globe

Stephen O’Connor is a writer from Lowell.

All of the dogs I’ve ever had have enjoyed going for walks. In fact, it’s the high point of their day. Our current dog, the beautiful Nessa of uncertain parentage, is no exception. If only people were so easy to please. A walk in the woods is best — places where I can let her off the leash to veer from the path and sniff at rotting logs, piles of leaves, moss-covered rocks, and animal tracks to her heart’s content. She bolts ahead and then looks back to make sure the slow-footed human is behind her. I’m sometimes tempted to hide behind a tree to see what she would do when she looks back and doesn’t see me, but I never do. I couldn’t be mean to Nessa or make her little heart skip a beat. She loves me. God, does she love me in the way that only dogs can love.

If I can’t manage a walk in the woods, I take her for a walk in “the Highlands,” my Lowell neighborhood. A while back, I began to see signs along the way bearing the simple request: “Please be respectful and clean up after your dog.” I endorse such signs. Surely it’s not too much to ask that people clean up after their dogs, and all the dog owners I know do so.

In the last year, however, I’ve begun to notice a plethora of new signs. On them, the dog walker sees a profile of a dog hunched for defecation inside a red circle crossed with a diagonal line. The respectful requests are gone, replaced with a surly insistence on the sanctity of private borders. “No Pooping,” “No Pee or Pooping,” “Keep your dog off the grass.” I’m no expert on canine evacuation, but I can assure you that consternation and condemnation do not produce constipation.

So this presents the dog walker with a problem, one that would appear insoluble. As much as I want to be a good neighbor, if Nessa, on our walk, suddenly crouches to do her business, am I supposed to say, “No! Bad girl! Can’t you hold it?” Should I put a diaper on her before we go for a walk? How do I teach her gastrointestinal restraint, and would that even be healthy? Maybe she could learn to use the toilet before we leave the house? How would you like to be in urgent need and find that every bathroom in sight was on jealously guarded private property?

In certain neighborhoods, the lawns go right up to the street, yet there are signs demanding that dogs keep off the grass. You want me to walk her on the street? Safety concerns aside, there’s not much for her to sniff on asphalt. A former zoning board official assures me that the city usually owns four feet from the curb, whether or not there is a sidewalk, but does everything in America have to come down to a legal dispute?

Several years ago, I was walking with the late and sadly lamented Kaiser. A typical egotistical male, Kaiser wanted all the other dogs to know that his territory comprised the land from the northern edge of Tyler Park south to the water tower. That meant that he would have to leave one drop of urine on various trees, street signs, and fire hydrants within his domain. One day he paused by the side of a tree on our route and left one or two drops. Kaiser was here! I heard the man of the house yelling something. I thought at first that he was trying to say that he liked my dog (Kaiser was a devilishly handsome standard schnauzer), and I waved a thank you. But as he approached, I could see that he was an angry curmudgeonly individual with problems that I’m sure went far beyond a drop or two of dog pee.

“You’re gonna just let him pee there?” he wanted to know.

“Sorry,” I said, “I usually bring a Dixie cup and collect it. I bring it home and store it in a large vat until I have enough to take to the canine urine disposal facility.”

I can be a curmudgeon myself.

When I was a child, there was no leash law. It wasn’t uncommon to see three or four dogs trotting down the street together. We used to simply open the door and out the dog would fly. We had no fence, and our Teddy was a Boston terrier that saw a bullmastiff in the mirror. He would go next door and fight with the five cats and come home bloody. Dogs roamed everywhere. No one picked up anything. I’m not waxing nostalgic. A lot of dogs were struck by cars. God knows what they found to chew on or devour in the urban wild. We’re better than that now. But dogs are still dogs.

For all their beautiful love and incomparable devotion, dogs are not familiar with Emily Post. If people leave their dog’s waste on anyone’s property, blame the people. Give them a fine, but give the respectful dog walkers and man’s (and woman’s) best friend a break. And be thankful you don’t live in, say, 1885, when 2,648 horses trod the thoroughfares here in Lowell.