No one can argue that there aren't a lot of dogs around campus. It seems like almost everybody has a dog, though in reality it's probably every third or fourth house.
Twice a day, each dog's owner takes poochie out for a "walk", whereupon it leaves a yellow stain in the snow. No one wants to make their dog wade through deep snow to a tree, so most of it gets deposited right at the edge of the sidewalk. Now let's do a little math.
Most people don't walk their dog more than a few blocks, so let's assume a 4x4 block home range. That's 16 square blocks or roughly 480 houses. If we use a conservative estimate of one dog every four houses, that's 120 dogs, each depositing some 8 oz of liquid twice a day. This occurs throughout the winter, with continuous snow cover typically from December to March. Hence, in a given 4x4 block area--your neighborhood--that's:
120 dogs X twice a day X 8 oz X 90 days = 1350 gallons of dog pee.
Enough to fill a swimming pool! Now divide by 64 (16 square blocks X 4 sides on each block) = 21 gallons of dog pee right along your block, i.e. the 6-8 houses in a row that are your neighbors.
We can zoom in even closer: 21 gal / 8 houses = 2.5 gallons of other people's dog pee right in front of your house. About now, this all starts to melt and flow straight onto the sidewalk. You may think you're wading through melted snow on your way out the door, but....
Go, Wisconsin!
What does this have to do with HSC? Sometimes people bring their dogs on board the keelboats, and sometimes, poochia has to do something that just can't wait. Some may recall this happening just last summer. There are also some other, more ephemeral links between pee and Hoofers, but we'll let you Mull over those.
The above calculation can of course be reduced to: 2 dogs/linear block X 16 oz/day X 90 days / 128 oz per gal = 22.5 gal along your block. But that 1,350 gal figure is impressive! And we haven't even mentioned the other stuff each of those dogs deposits once a day...
Thursday, March 14, 2019
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