It’s taken a few years, but it seems the North Ayrshire Council has finally acknowledged Beanie & Biggles’ tireless work in the field of poop pickup and disposal. At the start of one of our regular walks we saw this stenciled onto the tarmac:

The council refers to poop as “waste”, totally ignoring its potential as a pre-kibble appetiser.  That’s why we prefer to use terms such as “bottom sausage”, “smelly chocolate”,  and in very cold weather, “poopsicle”.

Note that the above “thank you” message covers only one aspect of our pups’ clean up activities. They routinely uplift dropped chips, pizzas and pieces of bread that would otherwise end up feeding pests such as pigeons and seagulls; they lick away drips from ice-creams, and they’ve even been known to use their absorbent fur to clean guano off the streets. Items that cannot be immediately removed – such as outrageously large horse droppings, bags of rubbish and so-on – are generally peed on to mark them for later collection. Occasionally their enthusiasm for their work results in legitimate roadside items being incorrectly identified as garbage; for example this very evening a gentleman’s motorbike was inappropriately “marked for collection” by Biggles. In his defense though I should note this incident occurred shortly after he’d had to woof at an excessively coiffured Poodle, which often makes him a bit free and easy with his yellow marker spray.

You might think that after all this hard work on walks they’d have neither the energy nor the will to continue their cleanup activities at home, but that’s not so. It’s common to see them whisking away discarded food packaging from the kitchen worktops and taking it down to the garden for proper disposal.

This strawberry container didn’t get to clutter the kitchen for long!

The binmen never look as happy as this when they’re at work!

So the council’s “thank you” message, while certainly welcome, only went part of the way to showing proper recognition of Beanie & Biggles’ tireless efforts. To make up for the deficit, I felt that a round of chews was called for..

Of course they got straight back to work right after those chews. Well, OK, maybe not straight after. I mean there’s nothing in their contracts that says they can’t have the odd nap, right?

Ayrshire’s best poop picker-upper is himself thoroughly pooped.