Advice on Dog Poop

What do you do when your kid won't even take your advice about dog poop?

Last night one of my daughters, Laura, called in quite an agitated state. Without coming up for a breath of air, she went from asking me questions, to drawing her own conclusions, and then paused long enough to hear what I had to say, before going straight into a rant of disagreement.

It seems that there is a fence between her property in the trailer park and the adjacent property. She wanted to know if it isn't true that when you put up a fence it has to be totally on your own property. Therefore, she assumes the land immediately over the fence would still be the property of the person who owns the fence.

She didn't pause long enough for me to say that in a trailer park, you don't really "own" the land. You own your trailer and technically "rent" the land, I think. I don't know for sure never having lived in a trailer park.

In any event, the woman at the adjacent trailer is throwing the poop from her dog over her fence into what Laura believes to be the other woman's strip of land, and therefore, the other woman's responsibility.

However, the neighbor says it is Laura's problem to clean up, even though Laura doesn't own a dog.

This would seem to be something for the manager of the trailer park to resolve, but Laura is not in good standing with the manager. Prior conversations have led me to believe that he perceives Laura as a troublemaker and would love for her to move out of the park.

So, I said, "Well, since it's your kids who are stepping in it, why don't you clean it up?"

You can imagine the response to that!

I continued, "What would happen if you just quietly and graciously cleaned it up every day?"

She was having none of that. She began to rant that she would contact legal aid today and find out what her rights are.

I asked just what that would accomplish. The person throwing the dog poop over the fence is obviously not a classy lady. She doesn't care about Laura's rights, and if Laura makes waves, she adds fuel to the park manager's fire that she is a troublemaker.

Sure, having to clean up the doggy-do is a lousy solution, but is there one that will likely have a better outcome for Laura?

She hung up rather abruptly.

So, what to do when your kid won't even take your advice about dog poop? Sigh.