Today from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., the Canine Adoption and Rescue League is holding its 11th annual Pooch Parade at San Buenaventura State Beach in Ventura. Organizers hope to raise money, promote dog adoptions and recruit volunteers to care for dogs in need of homes.

For $40, you and your dog can join the parade, enter several contests and share a T-shirt. If you cannot both fit into one shirt, you and your dog will have to find some way to decide who gets the shirt. I usually settle arguments with my dog by playing rock/paper/scissors. He chooses paper every time, so I usually win.

Many parade participants recruit sponsors who donate to the rescue league, and the organization provides various prizes for increasing levels of contributions. Participants who raise more than $250 receive gift certificates for the league's Pet Care Center, which offers grooming services including baths, haircuts and nail trimming.

On a more serious environmental note relating to parading with your dog at the beach promenade today, what do you do with doggy doo? Doo is one thing no one really likes sharing with a dog.

Dog doo by the beach, on a sidewalk or in storm drains is a serious issue because it can spread fecal coliform bacteria, which makes people sick. Fecal coliform is monitored by Ventura County's Environmental Health Division to determine if beach water is safe for swimming. It is also one of the major pollutants regulated by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.

The water board recently placed new storm drain cleanup requirements on the Malibu area and is considering similar conditions that could require Ventura County residents to pay for massive improvements to our stormwater management system. Those are costs your dog is not likely to share, even though it is his doo.

Any time you are out with your dog, you should have a little plastic bag to collect your dog's deposits. But what then? Also, what about the unbagged doo collected from your yard with "pooper scoopers"?

Dog doo should not go into your home compost pile. Dog doo is not called manure or treated as a fertilizer, partly because it is messy to handle and does not come mixed with bedding such as straw or wood chips.

More important, in addition to fecal coliform, dog doo (like cat feces and the scat of most other carnivores and birds) can carry organisms parasitic to humans, according to the Rodale Book of Composting.

Similarly, dog doo should not be put into yard-waste containers. If your material is randomly selected for sampling at the site of a commercial composter, that composter could fail a test and face regulatory consequences.

Dog doo also should not be buried. A buried stash of doo would be like an unsecured septic system. Disposal in the ground can affect groundwater quality.

Leaving doo on the lawn is also not a good option. Dog doo is a food source for rats.

The most reasonable thing to do with doo is to bag it and throw it into your garbage. Our local landfills are designed to capture and treat both methane gas rising from rotting refuse and liquid leachate dripping through the putrid pile.

Loose dog doo in your garbage, however, makes your cart, your collector's trash truck and a garbage transfer station's floor gross and stinky.

It could also spread harmful bacteria. So even if you collect doo with a shovel, put it into a bag before throwing it away.

When I discussed the doggy-doo dilemma with Bartok, my dog, he suggested I just fling his doo into my neighbor's yard. You have to understand Bartok's disdain for my neighbor. My neighbor has a cat.

Someone once noted that if aliens are observing Earth, they probably have noticed humans and dogs connected by a leash, typically with the human being pulled along by the dog.

Even when the human seems to determine the destination, the human carries a little plastic bag, waits patiently while the dog squats, then picks up the doo to properly dispose of it. Aliens could easily conclude dogs are in charge and humans serve them.

Really, when good humans interact with the species that loves us most, we pick up their poop because we have an eye on the environment.

On the Net:

http://www.poochparade.org

— David Goldstein is an environmental resource analyst for the county of Ventura. Representatives of government or nonprofit agencies that want to submit articles on environmental topics for this column should contact Goldstein at 658-4312 or david.goldstein@ventura.org.