Poop bags are really bad news for the environment. Yet thousands of "good" dog owners religiously pick up their dog's poop in a plastic bag, and then put it in a garbage container that is going to go to a landfill somewhere.

The bag will get holes in it during this process so the feces will leak out and leach into our water tables. And the plastic takes... we don't know actually... but a hell of a long time to break down.

If Dr Milstein is committing this environmental travesty without thinking, so is almost everyone else. But when one does think about it, it is astonishing that we have come such a little way to being thoughtful about the environment. The thought of all those plastic bags full of you-know-what, sitting in land-fills for god only knows how long, ought to upset thoughtful people to say nothing of revolt thoughtful people. But few people seem to be thinking.

I flick my dogs' poop into the bushes so that the bugs can eat it. (For really revolting you have to see a pile of poop being devoured by a huge slug!) And I tell others to do the same. If I walked my dogs in my neighbourhood then I would have to pick up their poop, but then I would flush it down the toilet. But I don't even walk my dogs in my neighbourhood because I know, like Dr Milstein knows, that being walked on a rope is very little fun or exercise and it is not nice for the neighbours either to see one of my dogs pooping on their boulevard even if I do pick it up.

I have always wanted to take a photo of a person walking a head-down, plodding dog and run an ad saying, "This is not your dog's idea of a good time". No money as usual.