Bonzer Words!: Processed Dog Food
Robin Hillard wrote this letter to his local newspaper, the Toowoomba Chronicle. Not surprisingly, the local council did not take up his suggestion.
Dear Editor
I am concerned that our Council is wasting a valuable resource; I am referring to the small piles of processed dog food which can be collected from the city's parks and streets, but which, at the present time, is simply discarded.
If our councillors read Mayhew's London they would know that in the 1850s dog droppings were highly valued. As Mayhew explains, dog dung is so highly alkaline that when it is rubbed into a raw skin it takes away the disagreeable odour often found in badly dressed leather, and he describes how workmen use their hands to rub dog droppings into the raw skin to purify it, which is why they called the product 'pure'. After skins had been treated, buyers tested the finished leather, both with their hands and with their lips, to make sure it had been properly purified, and I am sure leather treated with the product of Toowoomba's dogs could pass this rigorous test.
In nineteenth century London, people collected 'pure' from the streets and sold it by the bucketful to tanneries in Bermondsey; Mayhew states that in 1850, in London alone the collection of doggy dung provided employment for about 200 people and an opportunity for citizens to set up their own small business.
Our city needs entrepreneurs, so, to encourage the establishment of a local industry, Toowoomba Council should provide incentives for dog owners to increase both the quantity and the quality of this valuable dung.
It is hard to believe that, in Toowoomba, most of this product is wasted, and instead of being rewarded for contributing to the establishment of a local industry, dog owners are penalised when their animals provide quantities of cleansing chemical, processed and ready for use.
© Robin Hillard
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Robin writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
