Hera: "Poop rules!"

Or rather, mind your dog's business. I'm starting to get pretty disgusted with all the dog poop that I'm seeing on the beach in the morning when I take my dogs there to run. Sure, it's possible not to notice it occasionally when your dog does his or her business. And for that reason, I pick up everyone else's poop just in case my dogs made a deposit behind a sand dune out of my view. But there's an awful lot of it right out in the open.

Why don't people pick up after their dogs? It gives all of us dog people a black eye and can lead to restrictive dog laws. The Virginia Beach SPCA, which is in PETA's own back yard, says that 25 percent of all fecal coliform bacteria (like Escherichia coli) in Virginia's Lynnhaven River can be traced back to dog waste. Ouch! And according to The Magazine of the Hydrological Society of South Australia, "A single gram of dog waste can contain 23 million fecal coliform bacteria." E. coli can kill people, and if it doesn't kill you, it will make you wish your were dead for a while. Yet all these bacteria are just being washed right into the water with every high tide or rainstorm.

Dog feces can also contain all manner of parasites, such as whipworms, hookworms, roundworms, tapeworms, cryptosporidia, campylobacter, salmonella, and giardia, each of which comes with its own set of unpleasant symptoms. I was "lucky" enough to get to witness (and clean up) the side effects of giardia in one of my first foster dogs, little Chihuahua Joey. The best way to describe it was "explosive, contagious, bloody diarrhea." Not fun at all.

And let's not even get started on the algae blooms that are caused by the nutrients that leak out of decaying dog feces into the water. The algae and other plants thrive on the nutrients and end up taking over the body of water, using up the oxygen and subsequently killing the fish and other life forms who need it.

So carry plastic bags with you whenever you go out with your dog and do your duty: Scoop up that poop. And, hey, when you pick it up, it's OK to look at it. In fact, you SHOULD look at it. That's the best way to monitor the health of your dog's gastrointestinal tract.

Symptoms that something may be amiss in the diet include undigested food or mucus in the stool, stinky or greasy stool, and chronic soft stool―these call for a reevaluation of and possible change in Fido's diet. Severe or chronic diarrhea, chronic constipation, black stool, no stool for two days in a row, a stool that is flat on one side, diarrhea following vaccination, or any change in stool accompanied by other ill-health symptoms should get you thinking about a trip to the vet in the near future.

And according the The Whole Dog Journal, you should get your dog to the vet right away if you see any of the following symptoms: "Raspberry jam-like mucus, [which] could indicate hemorrhagic gastroenteritis; profuse liquid diarrhea with pungent iron smell, containing blood or pinkish-brown, [which] could indicate parvovirus; stool containing frank red blood, [which] indicates injury or illness in the [gastrointestinal] tract; and any diarrhea in a puppy, [which] could rapidly cause life-threatening dehydration."

So don't be shy―get the straight poop on your dog's daily doo-doo. It's one more way of showing how much you care.