Salt Lake County Utah - No one likes seeing, smelling, or stepping in dog poop, but did you know that unscooped poop presents serious issues for water quality and human health?
- Pet waste is raw sewage. It can transmit bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens to humans and other animals, including tapeworm, roundworm, E. Coli, giardia, salmonella, and more.
- Four out of ten U.S. households have at least one dog, and four out of ten of those dog owners don’t pick up after their dogs.
University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension Service - …Cumulative Effect. Perhaps you are thinking that the small pile left on the lawn this morning couldn't cause that much harm. Consider this, according to survey data there are approximately 0.6 dogs for every US household (AVMA, 2018)…What does this mean in terms of pet waste? Using EPA's estimate that each dog produces 275 pounds of waste per year, this comes to over 19 million lbs of dog waste per year... So if you don't pick up after your pet, you are just piling on to the problem…
PetMD- America's 78.2 million dogs collectively deposit 10 million tons of waste per year... That’s enough to fill some 268,000 tractor trailers…Dog feces can carry a host of disease and worms -- including heartworms, whipworms, hookworms, roundworms, tapeworms, parvovirus, giardia, salmonella, and even E. coli...
University of Washington College of the Environment - On average, a dog excretes between 0.5 and 0.75 pounds of waste per day. One gram of dog waste contains about 23 million coliform bacteria, nearly twice the amount found in the equivalent amount of human waste. It is estimated that only about 60% of dog owners consistently pick up their pet’s poo – that leaves a heck of a lot of poo and pathogens lying around... In just a few days, 100 dogs can produce enough bacteria that, if left on the ground, could wash into the ocean and temporarily close a bay, and all watershed areas within a 20-mile radius, to fishing and swimming!
