Pacific Heights neighbors have been horrified recently by a repeat offender who kept leaving dog-poop bags on the sidewalk outside a particular home —an apparent passive-aggressive critique of a long, annoying construction project.
In the annals of dog-poop-related crimes, this was obviously bad. But it did get me, a new dog owner, thinking about a less obvious and long-running debate dividing San Franciscans: Is it OK to put my dog’s poop bag in someone else’s trash can?
If I’m on a long walk with my dog, do I have to carry a hot baggy filled with feces all the way home if I don’t pass a city trash can? Or can I leave it in a stranger’s Recology bin on the street?
First, I asked the good people of Nextdoor, since this question seemed genetically engineered for their particular prefrontal cortexes. After seven days, 771 San Francisco residents had responded (opens in new tab). Of them, 63% were firmly against, saying it’s never OK to leave a poop bag in someone else’s can; 15% were in the “anything goes” category; and 22% said it’s fine to leave the baggy in someone else’s garbage so long as it is on the street awaiting pickup.
But the people who feel strongly feel very strongly. “Stay out of my garbage can!!! Use your own. How hard is that to understand?” wrote one neighbor.
“I’m sure the homeowner will thank you for making his garage smell to high heaven for the next seven days,” quipped another.
One person DMed me to say it was rude to even ask the question.
Next, I asked dog owners in the wild. The owner of Fiona, an adorable mixed breed who lives in the Mission, said he keeps a mental map of public cans along their routes, but often there isn’t one for long stretches, in which case he puts baggies into private bins awaiting pickup on the street. The owner of Paddington, a wirehaired pointing griffon, agreed. “Especially if I’m in no man’s land, I’m dropping it in any trash can I can find. You live in a fucking city!”
Source: Emily Dreyfuss/The Standard
To me, this seems entirely reasonable — they are trash cans, after all! And San Francisco famously doesn’t have enough public cans — in fact, on the 1-mile walk between The Standard’s office and the nearest BART station, you pass exactly zero public trash cans until hitting Market Street.
As a homeowner, I am fine with others putting their poop bags into my trash can. Far preferable to them leaving their poop on my lawn or the baggy on the sidewalk! But I am no expert, so I called up professional ethicists to get their takes.
To the dog owners who want to do this and not feel a little bad, I’m sorry. All seven of the ethics experts I spoke with agreed that we need to take our poop baggies home or put them in a public bin.
It comes down to two ethical considerations, according to Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics: virtue and the common good.
“Virtue framing asks, is this option that I am considering going to make me the person that I want to be?” Skeet explained.
Think of virtue framing this way: If you were trying to impress a very hot, very ethical guy, would you want him to know that you put your dog’s poop in someone else’s trash can? If the answer is no, then you know it’s not the virtuous thing to do.
The common good framework asks you to consider whether putting the poop in someone else’s bin is good just for you or for everyone. I might argue that it’s good for everyone, because you are putting the poop in a trash can. But there is one person who might not see it that way: the owner of the bin. And that owner might feel like the person on Nextdoor who wrote, “Stay out of my bins and my lawns, I keep them decent for myself, not for your four-legged kids, once I caught you in person [or on] camera, definitely I will deliver those back to your mailbox.”
Source: Emily Dreyfuss/The Standard
Now, if this were Chicago, where the city owns the trash cans that individuals use, then it might be a different story. University of Chicago philosophy professor Justin Vlasits noted that in this situation, “there isn’t much difference in your right to put poop in your bin and another person’s, especially if your putting the poop doesn’t interfere with anyone else putting trash in the bin.” (Vlasits, who has a dog, said he always takes the baggies home.)
But in San Francisco, we pay for our own bins (technically, we rent them from Recology), and we get to decide what happens to them. City College of San Francisco philosophy professor Stephan Johnson said that makes it a question of consent: “Would your neighbor be OK with you depositing poop in their can?” We can see from the Nextdoor responses that the answer is often no. “Without consent, the deposition of anything in another’s is always morally suspect,” Johnson concluded.
This question strikes at the heart of what it means to cultivate community, said Rhonda Magee, founding director of the Center for Contemplative Law and Ethics at the University of San Francisco Law School. She finds this principle useful in thinking through the ethics of the question: “Don’t take anything that is not freely given to you.”
“As I happen to know from conversations with people I consider to be reasonable, at least some would object to me using their bins for this purpose; hence, I would err on the side of assuming that such a bin is ‘not freely given’ and avoid it,” said Magee. (But in an emergency, she said it would be acceptable.)
Recology, the company that handles trash in our fair city, says poop bags should go in public trash cans or your own brown bin. Never put them in a green bin, even if they are compostable bags. This was news to me and many of the dog owners I consulted, but according to Robert Reed, a Recology spokesperson, “Our compost facilities are not permitted to process fecal matter.”
So here’s what it comes down to: definitely don’t put your dog’s poop in the green bin. And if you want to be perfectly virtuous, carry the baggy home or schlep it until you see a public trash can.
As for me, after hearing from all these ethicists, I must admit, I still don’t think it’s that big of a deal. It’s an ethical misdemeanor, not a major offense, and though I haven’t done it yet, I’m not a perfect person, and one day I probably will. And if I get caught tossing my dog’s poop in your bin? I’ll be slightly embarrassed, and I’ll apologize to you, and then I’ll move right along with my life.