Pick ‘it’ up: It’s just plain courtesy

Danville City Council has set its sights on it — and not a moment too soon. People are complaining that their neighbor’s dogs are leaving it on their lawns and sidewalks, and there’s way too much on some sections of the Riverwalk Trail.

With the trail’s growing popularity, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to allow it to mar an otherwise beautiful outdoor experience. For that matter, it’s just plain wrong that some people allow their dogs (and cats) to leave it everywhere for someone else to pick up.

The real issue here is courtesy, which isn’t all that common these days. If people routinely cleaned it up, we wouldn’t be having a problem with it in public places.

“Citizens have been expressing their frustration with animal waste on sidewalks and the Riverwalk Trail for some time,” Danville City Manager Lyle Lacy said.

The problem is that it is even showing up at local ball fields, where careless owners let their pooches run the bases, so to speak. Who wants their Field of Dreams turned into a Field of It?

“We’ve had some football teams refuse to use our fields because of the amount of stuff out there,” Bill Sgrinia, Danville’s director of Parks, Recreation & Tourism, said. “We’ve actually taken some gates off the ball field at Ballou Park because of it.”

Why were the gates removed? To make it tougher for lazy folks to lock their dogs inside the fields, where they could roam like it was a dog park and deposit it like an inside-the-park homer that nobody will cheer for.

In response to it where it doesn’t belong, Danville City Council will consider an ordinance that would fine humans up to $250 if their animals leave it on someone else’s property.

The solution, of course, is as simple as a leftover plastic grocery store bag tucked into one’s pocket before they take Fido for a walk. A lot of people already do that, and a quick trip to any store that sells pet supplies shows a wide variety of products that help people clean it up.

Danville City Council can’t legislate common courtesy and human decency, of course, and some are likely to criticize council for worrying about it when it has piles of unfinished business to get through.

But that misses an important point about city living, which comes with its share of compromises. One of those is that people have to behave in such a way that others are able to live in close proximity to them.

When the courteous thing isn’t done, then we all lose a little bit of what makes urban life bearable. It has to be contained, cleaned up and properly disposed of, or it will become a regular part of our lives.

That can’t be allowed to happen, or we’ll all be stepping in it.