Before talking about the poop test, which may naturally drive away some (or most, or all) readers, I just wanted to say that Thirteen and Nutty and I went to another entrance of the Eno Park yesterday and it was great. The slope down to the river is much gentler and Thirteen had much less trouble climbing back up the hill. The path was nice and wide too. There was a log that they had trouble climbing over, but that was the only obstacle.
Okay. In order for Thirteen to go to the dog park, she has to have a poop test. Or "fecal examination" if you want to sound more technical. But "poop test" means the same thing. I'm glad that they are taking steps to keep dogs with infectious nasties out of the park, but it occurs to me that a dog could pass the poop test and then six months later get parasites and no one would be the wiser.
Anyway. As you might guess, you can't have a poop test without poop. Which I collected in a bag on Saturday afternoon. Ugh. Unfortunately it was right after the vet closed for the weekend, but I figured it would be okay. Because on Friday night, Herve mentioned that he had previously worked in parasitology, and described the poop test as he conducted it. (If you are already grossed out by this post, you should stop reading now. And feel sorry for Georg and me, who heard this over dinner.) According to Herve the sample is placed in a coffee filter, and water is run over it until it completely dissolves. Anything that remains in the filter is a parasite. I'm sorry if I have ruined coffee for anyone. I did warn you.
Armed with this knowledge, I figured that it didn't matter whether the sample was fresh. After all, a dead parasite must be the same size as a live parasite, right? I left it the bag on my porch until this morning when St. Francis reopened. Handed over the bag, and mentioned that it was from Saturday and would it still be okay for their test. Her response floored me: "Was it refrigerated?" The bag of dog shit? No, I didn't put it in the fridge with my food. Imagine that!
So the upshot is that I need to get another sample for the poop test. There's no rush, because Nutty is here for another week or two. I'm not going through all this rigamarole for him too, so we'll have to wait until after he goes home to check out the dog park. I just want to get it over with so I can stop thinking about poop.
I hate the stupid Durham dog park and their ridiculous registration policies and rules. You're right, Sarah, the poop test is meaningless. The problem is that the dog park sterring committee (the folks who came up with the rules) are a bunch of anal retentive asswichs who believe that the majority of dog owners are unfit to own dogs, much less bring them into their precious dog park (I know this because I am acquainted with people on the steering committee). So they came up with a bunch of pointless rules designed to make it as difficult as possible to bring your dog to their dog park.
My favorite rule: No small dogs in the big dog area and no big dogs in the small dog area. I have a big dog and a small dog. I would have to leave one of my dogs in the car while the other played, and then switch them out. I couldn't have both of them in the dog park at the same time.
Meanwhile, there have been several occasiones in which aggressive dogs have attacked other dogs at the Durham dog park ... so the rules aren'te rally that much protection, are they?
It would take a major trauma for me to give up coffee, but I think your post does explain some cups I've had at certain cafes.
Lisa: I take it you don't recommend the dog park? That's a bummer. I was thinking that I could take her on off-hours, when there might only be a few other dogs there, so she wouldn't get mauled or just overwhelmed.
I had read the list archives and saw that there had been attacks, & that the dog whio had been attacked was the one that had to leave the park. Which totally sucks. Way back when, I stopped going to the dog club on Duke campus because Lina started fighting with other dogs and I could tell she was going to do it again. So I removed her from the situation. I can't imagine letting my dog drive another dog away from a park.
Mike: Sorry!
As an analytical chemist, I never got the opportunity to analyse dog poop, but I came very close to this when I was asked to work on rat piss! The major chemical company I worked for was concerned about a certain fluorinated fatty acid which was used in the synthesis of fluorocarbon resins. Apparently this stuff got into the bloodstream of anyone who happened to work with it and stayed there! The animal lab was feeding it to rats and wanted to know if it came out in the rat's urine metabolized or unchanged. I set up my instrument, a $500K NMR spectrometer, to run on fluorine over a weekend and looked at one of the samples. Sure enough, I was able to detect the compound in question, and it had passed through the rats without being metabolized. A few weeks later my manager asked me if I wanted to buy any new equipment before the end of the financial year. I told him I needed a fluorine probe that would take 10mm sample tubes, since I only had a 5mm fluorine probe and it was very hard to get the rats to pee into the 5mm sample tubes. I won't repeat his reply. Incidently, rat piss smells about as bad as one would expect.
Ha! Funny story. Hey Kevin, Nellorat? Have you ever tried to get your pet rats to pee into a 5 mm sample tube?