In my local countryside lanes and wooded walks, no one is bagging the excrement deposited by the deer, foxes, rabbits or birds. There are luxuriant piles of horse manure in the fields. Cow dung is positively welcomed on the common by boho surburbanites for its contribution to biodiversity. Pet cats deposit their poop not just in the countryside, but also in my garden. So why is it only dog poo we take exception to?

‘Your dog just did a poo,’ a passerby said this morning. I looked at her non-plussed. Was this supposed to be praise, like an adult admiring a child’s majestic mastery of the potty?

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘How rude!’ she huffed. I’d forgotten that blithely walking past your dog doing its business in a hedge in the countryside is completely verboten these days.

I get it. I am supposed to pick it up, carry the steaming warm bag for a couple of miles and then put it in a bin, from whence it will be transported by local council waste collection to landfill. But why is that better than letting it decompose and return to the earth like all the other animals do?

The French choose to mind the merde

If my dog did it in the middle of the path, I promise I would pick it up, but she sensibly pushes her hindquarters into the hedgerow, or takes herself to the outermost limits of a field. I can’t claim any credit for this – it’s often hard to tell which one of us is actually mistress and has trained the other – but it springs from some instinct. An instinct we should pay attention to.

Eight million dogs produce more than 1,000 tonnes of mess every day in the UK. Clearly that can’t be left on pathways, pavements, parks and gardens where children play. But in the countryside we should apply discretion about when dog waste is fair or foul.

I think the English are a little peculiar about dog poo. Just as people wore their face masks at half mast during the pandemic to signal social conformity but actually achieving nothing, so people make a great show of collecting dog waste and then abandon it on the path, plop it on top of a bin or, even worse, festoon the feculence on the hawthorns and wild roses. Dog excrement and plastic waste at eye level do not enhance the view.

The French choose instead to mind the merde. I lived in Paris for a while in my 20s and used to pick my way through the sixth arrondissement like a debutant dancing a cotillon through the piles of poodle doo-doos. While I do not advocate adopting Parisian lax standards to pet etiquette, at least they were spared the sodding sacs de caca.

We’re not just peculiar about dog poo, we’re odd about all poo. Perhaps human awareness of decay, putrefaction and bodily waste are linked to our fear of death. In the Freudian ‘anal phase’ some psychologists believe that a deep fear of extinction and death merges with the representation of the discarded stool. One writer suggested that this – and a need for order in a chaotic world – might be why people stockpiled toilet paper in the early days of the Covid panic. Faced with a brutal reminder of the possibility of death, perhaps they sought to symbolically clean away the stench of their mortality.

Earnest dog walkers in rural hinterlands should stop being so anal, get to grips with their mortality, take a leaf out of this mutt owner’s manifesto and relax about the odd poo tucked away in the hedges. Life’s too short to bag ‘em all.