America and Pooping Dogs

I watched an Animal Planet television program last night entitled It’s Me or the Dog. The program features a lady dog trainer who visits people’s homes to assist in training unruly poochies. Some of the stuff is fairly awful. Last night’s show crossed the line.

Four twenty-something girls rented a home together. These were white, middle class chicks who I rapidly concluded personified everything that is wrong with America today. Three of the girls had dogs, and two of the girls had more than one dog. Although the dogs were tiny dogs, all animals must perform certain bodily functions in order to survive, including doing their duty.

To put it bluntly, these babes could care less, and allowed the dog to defecate throughout the house. Months of feces was everywhere, including inches on the pack enclosed porch. It was under the beds. It was in every room in the house. The dogs were male dogs, and staked out their territory continually all over the furniture. There were feces on the wall. It was disgusting. The trainer was so repulsed; she called in an EPA dude who told the girls to shut the door to the one bedroom in which one of them slept, and to seal the cracks around the closed door with tape.

When the three dog owners were asked why they would allow this to happen, they answered they were too busy to walk the dogs. Apparently the girl with the sealed bedroom went away for days at a time, and simply locked the dogs in her bedroom. Minimally, the landlord should have been called; then the Board of Health; and then animal charities.

How have we come to this point as a society? What world do we live in where 23 year old girls would choose to live in a house full of poop and pee…and think it was funny…and then be incensed that the living conditions were even called into question? I could understand it if these people were mentally ill as you read about from time to time in the news. That wasn’t the case here. They were simply too lazy to clean up when it interfered with their social life.

Individual responsibility has become a thing of the past in this country. When we have reached the point where one thinks other people should clean up after their dogs in their home, we may have reached the point of no return. Nobody takes personal responsibility for anything anymore. It is always someone else’s fault. It should always be at somebody else’s expense. And we, as a society, must put an end to it or our society will collapse under its own weight.

The problem manifests itself on television where the ABC Family Network (owned by Disney) glorifies teenage pregnancy by portraying it as glamorous in one of its evening teeny bopper sitcoms. It manifests itself on MTV in the Real World series where complete strangers are thrown into an expensive residence to live together, and hopefully sleep together as soon as possible to keep the ratings up. It manifests itself in our schools where the values of the collective are personified as opposed the values of individual work and responsibility.

It manifests itself in our governmental social policy which continually institutionalizes unemployment and dependency on social services while punishing those who manage to work hard, raise a family, and try to pay the bills. Any government that accepts an unemployment rate of over 8% as normal fosters irresponsibility. We are at 10%, and quietly economists are saying that it may stabilize just a little under 10%. Economists also quietly say that the unemployment rate is 17% based on the number of lost jobs rather than those actually filing for unemployment benefits.

It is time for America wake up before we find ourselves living in a country littered with people letting their dogs poop all over, and shrugging their shoulders and walk away. I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of cleaning up, and paying for, other people's messes.