Where I used to live my neighbor would collect his dog doo and just bury it into his clay soil at the back of his property. And all I can say is that the dog doo was amazing!

Within a month, anywhere the dog doo was buried became rich loam; it was as if the clay was never there. What he ended up doing was this. As he got more and more rich soil, he would swap that with clay from another section of his yard. Within a couple years his back yard was beautiful!!

The reason it only took him a couple years to do his back yard was because it was small; we were in townhomes.

BTW, I see nothing wrong with using dog doo if your not using it initially in a veggie garden. Shoot, most folks don't even pick up their dog doo in their back yards.

The wonders of poo!!!!!! Really any and all poo is great so longs as dealt with responsibly. Hot composting poo is really far better than flushing down a toilet. Some manure is rather safe for just about anything (bunny) and others are better aged/composted. Yet others should be hot composted for the most safety but the truth is most poo really isn't all that dangerous with a little common sense. Most people are just too fecophobic.

Thanks for the update on your dog manure composting.

Here is a link that might be useful: Humanure Handbook

I compost dog manure also.

Its a small component of the entire pile. It decomposes quickly and I figure its better off decomposing in the amidst the other materials, than left on the lawn.

That's just it, the amount of dog doo is so small compared to the rest of the pile, it is highly probable that it just disappears. I've never had any offensive smell or flies/maggots as long as the poop was composted in the middle of the pile and turned in every few days or so. Heck, the expensive dog food my wife feeds them, we might as well enjoy some benefits of them using it. By the end of the compost cycle, I seriously doubt that there is any danger in my pile from using it. I really want a composting toliet, but I need to sell the wife on the idea and I am still working on it.

Keeping in mind that the origin of many of the Publoc Health Laws of today had origins back in the early 1900's because of a young Irish immigrant named Mary Mallon (nicknamed Typhoid Mary) who was a carrier of Typhus but never actually had that disease dogs, and cats, are known, even if they are very healthy, to be carriers of many disease pathogens that affect humans. As long as you are willing to expose your family to the potential exposure to these disease pathogens, or can actually get and hold the high compost temperatures, 150 degrees for 3 to 5 days, you may not want to use your pets waste products in the compost going onto soil that will grow food.
Keep in mind that you cannot see disease pathogens.

155 degrees F will kill most disease pathogen in a few minutes. 50 C or 122 degrees F will take care of most disease pathogens given a few days.

As to dog and cat poo exposing your family to pathogens. Anyone who cleans the kitty litter is being exposed and anyone who cleans up the yard of the dog poo is being exposed. Anyone who plays on that yard where the dog poo was is being exposed. These manures are rich sources of nutrients but you do want to make sure they are put in the hot center of a well managed hot pile. And you do want to make sure they stay in that hot center for several days.

Anyone who cleans the kitty litter is being exposed and anyone who cleans up the yard of the dog poo is being exposed

That's true. Anyone who is pregnant should never clean the kitty litter box or be in the room when someone else is cleaning the box.

And our whole planet is litteraly a writhing seething mass of bacteria and viruses each one giving off its little bits of poo here and there. Fishes pee in your watersupply and your peanut butter has an acceptable level of rat hair.
Sing it with me:
Its the CIRRRRRCLE of life!
;)

Note the above is pretty much totally true but I'm posting it as satire. That said I continue to be amazed how wierd people get about poo. Its as if theirs doesn't stink.

Lol, I have to admit that the ick factor is too much for me, too.

There may have been an evolutionary advantage to being repulsed by contact with waste from our own species. After all, cholera, typhus, and parasites were big problems before there were antibiotics and water treatments. Still is a big problem in some parts of the world.

Perhaps, by extension, most of us have the same reaction to those animals we keep as pets, especially since they are primarily meat eaters and some of the parasites are communicable.

Most bacteria and viruses are killed at 70 degrees Celsius (158F). Some pathogens, such as the anthrax bacterium, require a much higher temperature, above boiling. Roundworms, which can be excreted by humans, cats, dogs, and other animals, will be killed if the temperature drops below freezing, but they can live for years outside of their hosts; if they make it down to the ground into parts that don't freeze, you can expect to find them in your food supply and animals.

You'll not find primate, canine, and feline "byproducts" in my compost. I don't know if I could bring myself to even try it.

Roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides) eggs are killed in hot compost in about ten minutes at 55 C. Apparently they can survive years at 0 C. They can also easily survive all parts of our modern sewage treatment to be dumped into the drinking water or spread on the land with sewage sludge.

Here is a link that might be useful: Humanure Handbook

Bump.

My concern would be the same as with blood meal and bone meal. These materials, even when reasonably pasteurized, have had incidents of causing health problems. I would not use it near plants you eat. It could be used in flower or other beds or in other non-food growing areas, if you are careful to work with gloves and a dust mask. my 2c

I find myself sighing as I read these remarks. Certainly my experience is not a Gospel reading but it is my experience. I've lived in this house long enough to have had three dogs. The first two were a chow and a golden. Anyone who has had a chow will likely confirm that they refuse to poop in their own yard if another location is likely to be available within the next 48 hours. I've never seen anything like it. So the chow is never a problem. The golden happened to be trained to poop out at the fence line, so we never had a problem with him UNTIL old age set in. I never knew how much food a dog could process in one day!!! We had piles EVERYWHERE! At first we picked them up and tossed them into the ivy where he had been pooping for years before. But you always miss some. It didn't take me long to realize that some of the piles I missed had been composted in place by insects and microbes. After thinking about that for a few weeks I decided to run some tests. I marked some fresh piles and let them go undisturbed. Others I sprinkled with sugar, corn meal, and sugar/corn meal mixed. The ones I sprinkled with corn meal were hilarious. They grew little fungal bodies that sent up a bunch of thin, black, mushrooms with almost no head on them. My wife called them Chia turds. Nothing much happened on the others and the corn meal piles were not very replicable. However, no matter what I did to the piles, they completely melted down into the soil within 4 days. On day 1 I saw flies on the piles and the piles looked exactly like you would expect. On day 2 I saw pill bugs on the piles and they started to soften at the edges. On day 3 the piles were unrecognizable as anything but a pile. And I also experienced stepping on a 3-day pile - it did not stick to my shoe! On day 4 the pile had melted down and you had to really look for it. So now to complete this thought from the intro, our current dog is half chow and half sheba inu. In keeping with the chow inclination, she will wait days to poop on someone else's property.

Since then I have done a little more study. There is a professor at UT Austin who is researching urban dung beetles. Apparently there are species of critters who decompose the dung from every species of animal. Otherwise we'd be walking around on miles of dinosaur dung. But anyway, she is looking into which species of insects are needed to decompose which species of dung.

Here is a link that might be useful: Google Search on Pat Richardson

Ick. Just ick.

I guess I cold-compost the poop from my bullmastiff. I put it in one corner of the property just past the lawn into the woods, and cover each addition with leaves. A couple of times per year I put on wellies and get in there and rake the whole shebang a few yards further into the woods. By now I ought to be able to grow just about anything in that dirt, I suppose.

Someday I'll get past the "ew" factor and use some of that stuff on my perennials. But I just can't get past the part where I like to stick my hands in the dirt. Bleargh. Dog poop stinks. And soil that had a comparatively high concentration of dog poop in it at one time or another...it would just take all the fun out of digging in the garden. Ew.

Cow poop, horse poop, bunny poop...none of those bother me anywhere near as much as dog, cat, or human poop.

AH, the fecophobia.

Mr. Hall, thanks for your post. I am still laughing about the chow's elimination habits.

I'm going to guess that it stays warm and humid in San Antonio. I know that here in Idaho, dog piles will survive most of the winter if left on the lawn.

When I met my wife, she had three large dogs and a small back yard. We picked up the mess weekly, but even the dogs had learned to walk on the railroad ties that bordered the yard.