Pet owners - please be considerate and pick up your dog's waste. I live on an end unit and my next door neighbor (the other end unit) lets their large dog poop in the common area next to our fence.
Normally, I wouldn't care. However when my child kicks a ball over the fence or needs to retrieve something, he has to walk through the mine field of dog feces. I don't like the poo on our shoes, on our lawn mower or anything else that can be tracked into the house. It's just nasty.
I just read an article on Philly.com today that bolsters my argument. I'm sure it's exaggerating a bit, but it reads in part:
Contrary to what one would intuitively think, many serious health risks associated with dog feces don’t become apparent until well after man’s best friend has done its business. The eggs of common parasites — Toxocara canis (a.k.a. roundworms), for example — don’t turn infectious for days or weeks. When the feces dry out, the eggs can contaminate the soil below, sometimes for years. This obviously poses a serious risk to children who play in parks that are frequented by dogs.
In addition to parasites, dog poo (and most feces, for that matter) contains immense amounts of bacteria, including Giardia lamblia and harmful types of E. coli. When improperly disposed of, dog feces can contaminate local water sources. That happened in Florida, Virginia, and Idaho counties. And last summer, researchers implicated dog poo as the source of much bacterial air pollution in select U.S. cities.
Link to entire article: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/public_health/Dog-doo-A-mound-of-public-health-trouble.html#ixzz1rE6c9IU1
