MAX EBB — "N
ot again!" I groaned. "Why, oh why does it always have to be on my dock?" The offending object was a perfect specimen of dog poop. It had happened before. I had complained to the Harbormaster, but there are several liveaboard dogs on the dock, and without positive evidence linking the calling card to the dog who left it, marina management was powerless to take action. I uncoiled a few turns of hose, turned on the faucet, and began to wash the offending material back into the Bay when a shrill female voice caught me all standing. "Max!" the voice shouted. "What are you doing? Stop!" It was Lee Helm, graduate student in naval architecture and a known treehugger. Instantly a long train of thought flashed through my consciousness. Sure, I guess if I were a good citizen I should walk all the way up to the marina park, find a doggy poop bag dispenser that wasn't empty, bring a bag all the way back down to my boat, collect the poop, and walk all the way back to the trash bins to get rid of the thing and then all the way back to my boat. But it wasn't my dog, and it wasn't my dog's poop. Furthermore, as various so-called boating advocacy lobbying groups used to insist back in the day when they were fighting hard against laws prohibiting overboard discharge, it's a tiny bit of pollution compared to industrial and municipal sources, and a tiny bit of pollution compared to other biological sources like sea lions, birds and fish. It is "to diaper a seagull," as one particularly memorable editorial in a long-gone sailing magazine summed it up. All this in the fraction of a second between hearing Lee Helm's voice demanding I stop, and the stream of water knocking most of the dog poop into the harbor. It was all gone and the dock was clean again by the time Lee had run down the gangway and reached my berth. "Gosh, Lee," I started to explain, feigning involuntary carelessness, "since this isn't from my dog, it didn’t even occur to me that I should have disposed of it properly. It's annoying enough just finding it here next to my boat." "No, Max, that's, like, not the point," said Lee, catching her breath. "You need to save a sample. Then the marina can figure out who done it." "Really?" I said. "They can do that?" "For sure," Lee informed me. "I just read this in the new regulations for liveaboards: If you have a dog, you have to Page 88 •
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submit a saliva sample to the marina office. They send the samples of all the dogs to a commercial DNA lab, where the results stay on file. Then, when you find something like you found just now, you send in a sample and they match it to one of the known dogs." "I didn't think the marina had the budget for that kind of thing," I said. "It's not expensive," Lee informed me. "There are a few competing companies that offer the service — and they have great names: There's PooPrints, there's Mr Dog Poop, and there's DogPile ID. That last one is run by the U.C. Davis Veterinary Genetics Lab. It's really intended for condo complexes and residential associations where they have some control over most of the dogs in the nabe. But, like, with a marina, with all the docks behind gates, it's a finite set. We know exactly which dogs are suspect." "How do I buy in?" I asked. "It would be worth a lot not to find this stuff on my dock every so often." "No cost to the berther, at least not directly," said Lee. "The marina pays about $30 or $35 for each dog that it adds to the DNA database. They make this a requirement of being a liveaboard with a dog. It's just a saliva swipe, easy to do. Then, when there's an offending pile, you ask the marina office for a sample bag, put in a small amount of poop, and they send it off to the lab. Cost of the DNA match is between $50 and $150, depending on which vendor they use."
"The dog's human was one of the more congenial liveaboards on our dock." "And once the offending dog is nailed," I added hopefully, "the owner is evicted from the harbor?" "Possibly," said Lee. "On the other hand," I said after thinking it through for a second, "I imagine the first positive match and a warning usually puts an end to the problem, since denial won't work anymore."
M
eanwhile, a large black lab was
pulling its human, whom I recognized as one of my liveaboard dock neighbors, rapidly down the dock in our direction. "Suspect number one?" Lee whispered. "Could be," I said as the dog abruptly stopped at my dock finger, ran right over to the spot that I had just cleared of the deposit, and gave the dock surface a very careful sniff. "You think that dog knows something that we don't?" I asked the owner, trying not to sound too accusing. After all, the dog's human was one of the more congenial liveaboards on our dock, a good neighbor and a frequent volunteer at the yacht club. "Fido hasn't been off the boat all morning," she answered, pulling the dog back to the main walkway by its leash. "But that nose doesn't miss a trick, so something interesting was there recently." "Yup," I confirmed. "Third time this month. A real steamer..." "We have an Astroturf pad on the foredeck," explained the liveaboard, "so even in a potty emergency, the poop is pretty much under control. I do have my suspicions about who the offender might be, though."
