how is that polluting??? you don;t chock in the river any plastic...just some natural and biofriendly stuff

Feces is full of bacteria. It does indeed pollute the river. Throwing dog poop into a river is no different that having a human sewer piped into a river.

Many wild things use rivers, and can be made sick from the bacteria from excrement. Humans, also, can be made sick from rivers polluted from excrement.

I agree with your point, and it's shameful that the water companies are still getting away with dumping large quantities of untreated sewage into rivers the way they do (though I thought the problem was the way it deprived the water of oxygen), but surely the odd dog poo here and there won't make much difference? I mean, fish and otters and things must poo in the river without doing it any harm.

lack of oxygen affects the life of the inhabitants of the river, yes. But other, land living, animals use the water too. And a human does not have to drink the water to be sickened by it. Swimming in it, or even just wading in it, just putting hands in it, can make a person sick.

Fish and otters are natural to that environment so I imagine mother nature has a way of dealing with that. Dog poop, especially poop from many of the commercial foods being fed today, can be highly toxic in a river as it is not meant to be there.

Think of it this way: if every one thinks the "occasional dog poop won't matter" then there is going to be a lot of dog poop in that river .

That's just like saying one mcdonald's bag thrown out of a car window won't matter, it's only one, after all. But many have that attitude and soon the roadsides are an ugly mass of mcdonalds bags and dead animals who have been hit while trying to get into the mcdonalds bags for the smell of food.

off my soap box for now

Ah ok fair point, rather than burying it or chucking it in the river to decompose among the silt which is flushed out to sea by the tide - I'll just do what I do the rest of the time then, wrap it in a (biodegradable) plastic bag, chuck it in a (not biodegradable) bin liner (both of which have been come from non-renewable sources and are produced by factories that use exhorbitant amounts of fuel oil, grid electricity and water and produce thousands of tonnes of waste each year, and come wrapped using card or paper, and have then been shipped from overseas or at least driven across our country, wasting more fossil fuels) and then the bin man can have the joy of picking it up using his great big truck (created using metals mined out of the earth) and burning yet more fuel driving it to put in a landfill site (well at least he can for the next 10 years until our landfill space is all used up, at which time it may have to be shipped abroad) where it can be added to the estimated 18 000 000 tonnes of municipal solid waste and 78 000 000 tonnes of industrial waste produced in the UK every year, and decompose slowly until it mixes with rain water and produces a stagnant filth called leachate which will contaminate the water in the ground - or in newer sites which are designed to minimise the leachate it will at the very least produce, amongst other harmful gases and chemicals dangerous to animals and humans, a nice little pocket of methane gas. Yummy

PS - muhahaha I do believe I've effectively killed this cleverly worded spam thread