Life As Performance Art 124

While walking in the forest yesterday, I noticed all these different trash cans with labels. The red ones are for, what is politely called, dog waste. This left me thinking of all the plastic bags that get used by dog owners. For some reason I can't find the cipher for Vancouver, but there are approximately, in Canada, eight million dogs, or seven million too many of those barking shit machines (I am not a dog-hater, more a dog-owner hater. Dogs are okay, it's their codependent humans that need help!). When you consider that all those dogs have to be walked every day, that means once a day, every dog has to have its shit picked up, and that presumably almost all the dog owners will be using plastic bags. So, let's say, that every day in Canada, between seven and eight million plastic bags get wasted on dog waste. I am glad that so many dog owners are cleaning up on their four-legged children. It makes walking that much easier for the rest of us. On the other hand, what would those same dog owners do without plastic bags? I agree that plastic is a problem. The environment is choked with it and it is destroying everything. So is our dependence on it. I agree that plastic needs to be reduced, and if possible, completely eliminated from the environment. Is that ever going to happen? Who knows? But dog owners, so emotionally dependent on their pets, are not going to be happy about not having anything to scoop up after their little best friends forever. And no one is going to accept kindly the notion of just leaving it there. We are not going back to those days. I remember one summer evening, more than twenty years ago, I was walking in Trout Lake Park, which has since been taken over by dogs, and I saw one lady going through an anxiety attack because she couldn't find a plastic bag for one of her big black poodles. Fortunately, I have long tried to carry a couple of plastic bags with me. I gave her one, she happily scooped up after her doggy, and the poodle came over for a pat on the head. He was saying thank you. Then, a few years later, on the Skytrain, a passenger was warning everyone that he was about to throw up. I reached into my pack and handed him a plastic bag, which he made quick and efficient use of. Then there was the fellow sitting next to me on a bus. He was eating a banana, and suddenly, he was holding the empty peel in his hand, not knowing what to do with it. I gave him a plastic bag. Problem solved. I try to reuse as much as possible. For garbage, I use plastic bags repurposed from frozen vegetables, bread, toilet paper, or similar packaging. Everything gets reused, washed, and reused again until it is no longer usable. Then, unfortunately, it goes into the landfill. Yes, we have to phase completely off of petroleum and other fossil fuels. But what, besides virtue signalling, are we going to do about plastic bags? We seem to have created a need that is not going to go away, or that isn't going to go away for quite a while, anyway.