Is it rude to throw dog poop bags in someone else’s trash?

There’s an ethical quandary that has plagued internet users for nearly 15 years. It’s not life or death, and it’s not about playing god. For some people, it’s not an ethical quandary at all, and they’re happy to tell you exactly that. But the question comes across my own social-media feeds with such frequency, and sets off such impassioned debate — as well as sarcastic tirades, legal arguments and almost always at least one all-caps yawp of “WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY” — that it feels frustratingly, eternally unresolvable. I’m talking, of course, about whether or not it’s OK to throw your dog’s poop bag in someone else’s garbage can.

Other seemingly low-stakes questions of taste and etiquette have churned through social media since social media has existed. Is pineapple on pizza sacrilege? Is it acceptable to take your shoes off during a flight? One’s gotta go: cake or pie? How would dogs wear pants if dogs wore pants? Yet none seem to draw anywhere near the amount of divergent and frequently hostile responses as this one. Looking at 20 different Reddit posts from within the last year that ask some variation of the poop bag question, posted in city-specific subreddits as well as in r/AmIOverreacting, r/mildlyinfuriating, r/TooAfraidToAsk and r/homeowners reveals comments in the triple and even quadruple digits, with many responses delivered with an iron-fisted, I-will-die-on-this-hill conviction.

“I would NEVER even DREAM of throwing it into a bin that isn’t mine. That’s so entitled. You chose to have a dog. YOU get to carry the sh*t till you get to your bin or a public one.”

“I would not give two hoots if someone put something bagged in my bin. Especially on the day the garbage is collected. This would not impact me in the slightest. It’s a bin. It has gross stuff in it already.”

“I pay for MY trash collection. No one else has the right to put anything in my trash can and that certainly includes dog poop.”

“You deploy a $15 wireless anti-theft alarm. You mount the main sensor to the underside of the bin lid. It comes with a remote key fob that usually reaches up to 100 feet. You arm the bin . . . When the entitled dog walker inevitably lifts the lid, the vibration triggers a 113-decibel siren directly in their face. When you hear the rumble of the actual garbage truck . . . You simply hit the “disarm” button on your fob from the comfort of your house.”

“This kind of NIMBY-ass bullsh*t is why the world sucks.”

“I’m from [civilized European city] and we don’t have this problem. Does your city not have public trash bins along the street?”

Clearly, this is not an issue that touches the lives of all of us (cat people, go ahead and feel smug). But for those it does touch, the subject provokes a level of feeling that suggests that when we argue about dog-poop disposal, we’re also grappling with larger questions about who we are, what we owe one another and what kind of world we want to live in. For every person who has one answer and only one answer (“This is one of the dumbest things people get mad about on the internet and in real life. Bag and tie the poop properly and throw it in the first available trash can. Do not carry it home, that’s weird”) there is someone who approaches the dilemma with a few other variables. (“If the can is out on the street because it’s garbage night, I think it’s fine to drop a bag on top of the other garbage. But I wouldn’t toss it in an empty bin after the garbage is picked up. And I would definitely not do it on a hot day. That is deviant behavior.”)

One of Northern California’s toniest neighborhoods is currently bedeviled by, according to the San Francisco Standard, “bags of dog poop [that] have been appearing for months on Jackson Street in Presidio Heights. The waste bags get dropped around a cluster of temporary “no parking” signs peppering the block for various construction projects along the street’s luxury homes.” One homeowner has planted surveillance cameras outside their home to catch the perp and is threatening to shame the “uncivilized” offender “all over social media.”

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Some residents have theorized that poop bags clustered around the no-parking signs are anti-capitalist protest against everyday disruption and noise pollution caused by constant construction projects. Others are reasoning that, hey, at least the poop was bagged — things have been way more chaotic in cities hit with heavy winter storms that, as they thawed, revealed a messy and seemingly wholesale abandonment of poop-scooping protocol. Still others are rolling their eyes at the hypervigilant owner of a home valued at $15 million apparently having so few real problems that surveilling the sidewalk for rogue poop bags seems like a worthwhile use of time.

I’ve lived in cities and had dogs for most of my life, and though I can’t say for sure whether the online poop-bag wars have escalated recently, their tone feels more righteous and hair-trigger right now. Which makes sense: We’re living in divisive times, in an inescapably mediated world with little nuance, that constantly asks us — eggs us on, even — to assume the worst of those around us and treat every personal difference as an unbridgable gulf. In this climate, it’s not surprising that a simple request on Nextdoor (“Folks, I am asking nicely that you NOT put your dog’s poop bags in my garbage cans”) can end up erupting into a full-blown flame war complete with legal threats.

It’s not surprising that your neighbors changed the name of their WiFi network from “daveandsheila” to “STOPPUTTINGDOGSH*TINMYBIN.” It’s not surprising to see garbage-bin lids sagging and cracking under the weight of concrete-block deterrents, or faces peeking from behind curtains at night, or 6-paragraph Nextdoor posts reminding people that dog-poop bags — yes, even biodegradable ones — do not belong in the yard-waste bin, and sure, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the yard-waste bin and the garbage-only bin, especially when it’s dark, so maybe, just to be safe, take your dog’s godd*mn bag of poop to your own godd*mn house.

And it’s certainly not surprising that people in urban neighborhoods seem to feel like their cities have only the most moneyed of their residents’ quality of life in mind. I’m lucky to live close to one of my city’s main arteries, which means that on most of my dog walks a city-installed waste receptacle is never too far away. But people in other parts of the city can walk miles without encountering one, and receptacles that formerly existed in high-foot-traffic areas have been removed. (An expansion program is underway, and in the meantime organized trash-pickup days and Adopt-a-Block programs have tried to cover the shortfall.)

“Look,” sighed one of my neighbors. “I’m not spending time gatekeeping my garbage. If a couple of poop bags end up in my garbage cans — I don’t love it, but it’s not ruining my week.”

A colleague in a different city takes an even more neighborly approach. “I spray-painted ‘poop’ on my trash can to actually encourage people to put their dog’s poop in there, rather than leave it in my yard. It has had mixed results, but makes me laugh every time I see it.” On walks with her own dog, she says, “I carry lavender-scented poop bags in my pocket at all times, and I usually do put [bags] in the nearest can, with exceptions: If someone’s can is full, or if it’s really hot out, I won’t contribute to their smells with more smells.”

Most of us, I think, recognize when we’re breaking the social contract. As a teen, I remember walking my family’s Golden Retriever on a rainy and windy day in New York City. As he squatted at the edge of the sidewalk, I looked at the soggy handful of newspaper in my hand and calculated the distance to the nearest public bin and thought, Ugh. Not today. I looked at the dog, the dog looked at me, and as we started to split the scene, a townhouse door opened and a compact, unsmiling man stepped out and raised his voluminous eyebrows at us, as if to say, Really? Busted. I skulked back, rolled the poop up in the newspaper and, face burning, mentally filed the address away so as to never walk by it again. (Some time later, I saw the man’s photo in a magazine article about his new movie and realized with horror that I had tried to ditch dog dung on Martin Scorsese’s sidewalk.)

These days I sometimes wish the biggest conundrum on my dog walks involved poop bags and other people’s bins. In a neighborhood with a bounty of wildlife, it’s more often questions I’m not prepared for: Should I use the toe of my sneaker to push the remains of a coyote-mauled bunny under a shrub so it’s not in the middle of the sidewalk? If two people with two dogs each are walking toward one another, which group should cede the sidewalk? Is the person passed out in the median asleep, or something else? How does my dog always manage to sniff out discarded joints when we walk along the bluffs, and is he building up a tolerance?

But I don’t see a resolution of the “poop bags in your neighbor’s garbage can: yay or nay?” debate happening anyway — and not just because there’s little possibility for ethical consensus in a hyper-individualized culture that encourages and rewards oppositional defiance. People have always come to the internet to argue, and right now, when there’s not a lot we can be completely sure of, there’s a comfort and familiarity to an evergreen argument. Being certain of one small thing and willing to argue it to a largely inconsequential end can feel like a respite from the things both consequential and very uncertain. And if it’s not, there’s always the option of a locking garbage bin.