Why Urinating Dogs Are Such a Menace to Nature in Cities
Reading Time: 7 minutesIs Dog Pee Really So Bad for Plants?, Signs begging owners to keep their pets off plants are a staple in New York City. Here’s how it’s come to this., Dog pee: Why it’s bad for city plants and how to get dogs to urinate elsewhere.
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If you live in a major city, dog pee may seem like little more than a nuisance, a stream or puddle to avoid on the sidewalk. Perhaps more obnoxious are all the signs, like the ones I spotted during a walk through Brooklyn the other week: ‘No poop/pee zone,’ ‘Curb your dog,’ ‘Please be respectful,’ or simply ‘No!’ written on the outline of a squatting dog. Outside the MediaDownloader offices, there are well over a dozen yellow signs in the plant beds that read, unequivocally, ‘PET-FREE ZONE.’
The sign that piqued my interest, though, was one at the base of a tree in Manhattan that denoted the reason behind the vitriol: ‘DOG URINE KILLS PLANTS.’ That’s when I started to notice that city trees have been equipped with a variety of defenses against their urinating foes. Metal fences. Mound of rocks. Entire planter boxes. String crisscrossed over tree beds. And then there are those signs, some of which even invoke sympathy by writing directly to pups (‘Dear Dogs, We love you but please don’t pee here‘) or in the voice of the plants (‘I’m trying to grow‘).
We all know the golden rule of scooping your dog’s poop, but I (admittedly, a non-dog-owner) had never stopped to think about the golden rule of the … well … golden stuff. Can dogs really kill plants—even trees!—simply by lifting a leg? Is the situation so dire that it warrants all these somewhat unpleasant signs urging dogs to stay away from the city’s greenery?
I was pleased to find that some scientists study exactly how dog urine affects plants, and they explained to me why little Fido’s puddles are much more insidious than they appear. I also went down a rabbit hole and learned why, exactly, the war between trees and dogs has gotten so intense.
First, there’s the composition of dog urine. The protein-rich diet we feed our pups causes their bodies to produce excess urea, a component in urine that contains a lot of nitrogen; as a result, dog urine holds roughly double the amount of nitrogen that’s in cow urine. While small doses of nitrogen are necessary for plants, it can be toxic in excess. One study published in 2022 found that, in a forested area where a lot of dogs are walked, each hectare received an input of 11 kilograms of nitrogen per year from dog urine and feces. That amount can not only harm plants, but it can also upend ‘the entire function of the ecosystem,’ says study author Pieter De Frenne, an ecologist at Ghent University in Belgium.
On top of that, while dog pee itself isn’t acidic, it can break down in a way that leads to acidification, and this can weaken tree bark. Combined with other forms of stress, like poor soil quality or physical damage from being bumped by cars, dog pee makes it easier for bacteria and fungi to set up shop on the tree and cause disease, says urban ecologist John Allen of the University of Helsinki in Finland. (Dog urine can also interact with the chemicals in metal and cause corrosion over time, and it even has been blamed for a few incidents of lampposts falling over.)
And on top of that, dog urine contains high levels of salt, so when a dog pees at the base of the tree, the soil becomes saltier than usual. That interferes with an important process called osmotic flow that plants depend on to draw water and nutrients from the soil, says Allen. Osmotic flow causes water to move toward the higher concentration of salt, so if the soil around the roots of the tree is very salty, that makes it harder for the tree to suck up water and can lead to dehydration. (Interestingly, New York City’s street trees are selected to be highly salt-resistant, according to former New York City Department of Parks and Recreation employee Rebecca McMackin, to withstand salted roads in the winter. But during other times of the year, when trees have leaves, excess salt can cause pretty major problems, even inhibiting photosynthesis.)
These concentrations are so high that even one dog’s bathroom break isn’t great for a plant, says Allen. But, as the 2022 study suggests, many plants are being visited by far more than one dog. In 2012, a New York City Economic Development Corporation report estimated there are around 600,000 dogs in New York City alone. And an individual dog has been estimated to produce about 736 milliliters of urine per day, with many city pups peeing in public areas rather than private backyards. Multiply the two numbers, and you have … a lot of urine.
‘Each dog owner is only thinking of their one dog,’ says McMackin, who is now an independent garden designer (and a dog owner herself). When she worked at Washington Square Park, she would watch dozens, sometimes hundreds, of dogs pee on a single shrub in one day. The topiaries, scorched from the onslaught, had to be replaced almost every year.
Even trees aren’t safe. Established trees probably fare better, but if the tree was young, newly planted, and regularly peed on: ‘I would think that that could kill the tree, absolutely,’ says Allen.
While dog urine is a threat to plants, the efforts to combat it are scattershot at best. New York City is famous for its 1978 ‘Pooper Scooper Law‘ that instituted fines for not picking up your dog poop. But those dog laws only address solid waste, with no mention of liquid. The Department of Sanitation doesn’t have any specific regulations about where your dog can or cannot pee, Joshua Goodman, the department’s deputy commissioner for public affairs and customer experience, told me in an email. (They do enforce the cleaning of sidewalks by property owners, which may include urine.) Parks Department rules state that no person should ‘kill, carve, prune, or inflict other physical damage to the tree,’ which can result in fines, but dog urine doesn’t fall into that category. ‘We do not assess fines or issue violations for dog urine,’ press officer Kelsey Jean-Baptiste responded in an email statement. Instead, they simply request orderly conduct: ‘We ask residents to please curb their dogs by taking them away from trees when they need to pee.’
With no Urine Lorax fighting for the trees, a mishmash of interventions by the Parks Department and the goodwill of local citizens tries to keep dogs off of them. The parks will install tree guards—fencing enclosing the bed around the tree—’to discourage pollution of any kind,’ but that’s only ‘as funding allows,’ Jean-Baptiste told me in the email. Community groups and block associations are responsible for putting up signs.
The department plants the trees and helps manage them immediately after planting. After that, maintenance of the trees remains the responsibility of the Parks Department, but, with so many city trees to manage, a tree can expect to be pruned only once every seven years, said Jean-Baptiste. Property owners, meanwhile, are the ones responsible for keeping their sidewalks clean, which includes removing weeds from the tree bed. The situation of the shared tree—managed by the Parks Department but on the land of a property owner, who is responsible for their property’s cleanliness—can make it unclear who is responsible for the tree’s daily troubles, says Timothy Gilles, president of the Park Slope Civic Council. ‘It’s like a business partnership where the two partners don’t speak to each other,’ he says of the parks and property owners.
The council is starting a campaign to educate Park Slope homeowners about what they can do to protect their sidewalk trees, which includes building or buying a tree guard and putting up signs. Gilles suggests that making the tree bed look nice—adding flowers, for instance—could help dog owners not want their dogs to pee there.
It’s unclear how well all these measures work, though. Anecdotally, McMackin points out that dogs are always jumping over tree guards. Working in public horticulture, she has gotten the sense that people think that their dogs are part of nature, and are therefore entitled to pee on plants, even though people like her really wish they would not.
All of this leads me to a new question, which is: Where are dogs supposed to pee? If plants and trees are a no, and the sidewalk does not seem ideal, either … should dog owners be cliché and look for the nearest fire hydrant?
It turns out: yes. Hydrants make particularly good pit stops because they’re often cast iron, which corrodes slower than other types of metal. As Allen notes, male dogs like to pee on vertical objects, and a hydrant is a vertical object that is, after all, not a tree.
Experts suggest looking for a good pee spot—an out-of-the-way spot that does not have plants— where your dog can empty their bladder at the beginning of your walk. If your dog starts to pee on an unsuspecting shrub, give a command like ‘Let’s walk,’ suggested Mary Burch, a certified applied animal behaviorist, in an email. ‘Responsible owners should include bathroom manners in their dog’s training routines.’
But there are other answers. To understand where else dogs could be peeing, we can look back to the 1930s, when the phrase ‘Curb Your Dog‘ came into common use in New York City—not a very clear imperative, given the multiple meanings of ‘curb.’ It turns out people have been confused by it for decades. When a couple of curious students reached out to the Department of Sanitation to ask what was meant, according to a piece printed in the New York Times in 1956, the department opted for multiple meanings: ‘It means, Restrain your dog. It also means, get him off the sidewalk and into the gutter.’
Indeed, for a long time, dogs used to be encouraged to use the bathroom on the side of the street, right below the curb. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, streets were used for ‘transportation, not car storage,’ reported the New York Times in 1996, and there was a one-hour daytime limit and a three-hour nighttime limit for parking a car on the side of the road. That would have left more space for pups to do to their business. Today, having your pup hop off the sidewalk can be more difficult, with so many cars driving and parked on the road, says McMackin. She has trained her dog to pee on the street in the ‘safe little space’ between parked cars.
In the future, McMackin sees a world with infrastructure additions that address the problem of dogs needing a spot to pee and plants needing to not be peed on. While at the Parks Department, she designed a fake hydrant that could be placed at the entrance of parks, but it never came to fruition. Allen has dreamed of similar solutions: ‘If you could engineer a thing around the tree, or around the pole, that would capture anything that fell in there and send it to the sanitary sewer system … that would be good,’ he says. Perhaps dogs could at least have designated pee areas on the sidewalk, sectioned off away from plants, pedestrians, and cars.
My investigation thus concludes: Yes, dogs (and irresponsible owners) can kill plants, and dog owners can help reduce the problem. But perhaps instead of leaving individual property owners to scold them, the city could be more accommodating of their needs, too.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/dog-pee-plants-new-york-city-bad-cars.html
Ref: slate
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