Taking your dog for a walk offers a chance to step away from everyday stresses and connect with your furry friend.
Dog owners know that it's important to clean up after them, as a neighborhood full of dog poop is a surefire way to stink up the place and encourage the spread of bacteria.
While most residents in Colombia know it's good manners to pick up dog waste in bags, a few have forgotten that there is a second step — putting the bag in the trash.
A Redditor posted a picture of a frustrating scene in one neighborhood, with a collection of little baggies gathering at the base of the tree trunk.
"I live in one of the most expensive neighborhoods of Colombia," they captioned the image. "This is how some of my neighbors dispose their dog poop."
Indeed, it seems that dog owners would have already done the hard part of the task by picking up the pup's present. The next part, disposing of the bag, is much easier.
"Why even pick it up?" one Redditor questioned. "Doing more harm than just leaving it to go naturally."
While that is perhaps a misguided take, as leaving dog poop on the street can allow parasites to leach into soil and cause health problems among humans and other animals, the sentiment makes at least some sense.
In this case, people are just putting more plastic into the environment, which can cause health problems of its own. The bags can gradually erode into microplastics that are becoming ever more ubiquitous on the planet, finding their way into the bodies of humans and animals, as well as water sources and even remote mountain ranges.
Bags could also be mistaken for food by wild animals, leading to plastic getting stuck in their digestive system and likely resulting in ill health or death.
While sending the bags to landfills still isn't ideal, it's better than wrapping the poop in plastic and leaving the bags against a tree.
According to a study published in the journal Environmental Pollution, and shared by Science Direct, as much as 1.23 billion tons of poop bags are disposed of annually. This material can harm the planet at all stages from its production to its disposal.
Thankfully, compostable poop bags are available to lessen the polluting impact of puppy parenting.
Still, even with compostable options, just remember to not leave them lying around, or you'll feel the planet's — and Redditors' — wrath.
"Those bags will not decompose in the lifetime of any of us here today," one user said.
"This is why the earth is going to exterminate us at some point," added another.
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