August 2006

Boulder's biggest muckraker isn't a journalist; he's a scientist who always gets the scoop.

Patrick Murphy has a practiced eye for excrement. He’s barely set foot on the trail, and already he has spotted two piles shrouded in foliage beneath a leaning Chinese elm. Murphy, who has precisely cut, barely graying hair and a round, gentle face, ventures onto Boulder’s open space with a fanny pack crammed to capacity with the instruments of a self-described “tech-weenie” and impassioned fecal crime fighter: GPS, PDA, cell phone, clip-on sunglasses, water, plant book, weed digger, and video-capable camera. A botanist by training, the 55-year-old Boulder resident is better known as that city’s famous “Pooperazzi,” so dubbed because of his penchant for stalking and filming delinquent dog owners — specifically, the ones who don’t pick up after their pooches.

Murphy earned the moniker in 2001 after he spent eight laborious weeks mapping piles of dog doo — 1,492 of them — on the popular Mt. Sanitas Valley Trail with a high-powered GPS unit. Soon enough, he began penning regular editorial-page diatribes in the Boulder Daily Camera against free-range canines and their “selfish” guardians. Murphy achieved full-fledged notoriety, however, when he videotaped a poop-and-run incident at a school near his home, confronted the perpetrator’s owner, and was arrested for misdemeanor harassment, a charge for which he was later acquitted. His crusade can be found on his website, too, which features a rhythm-deficient “Crap Rap.” Sample lyrics: There’s crap around the churches/And crap around the schools/Why are we all dancin’/Round the little doggy doos?

Why all the fuss about feces? Murphy got into the business of poop because of his passion for native plants. “What really got me started was weeds,” says Murphy, who discerned a proliferation of Houndstongue, a state-listed noxious plant species, on citytrails in the late 1990s. “I noticed when I was pulling weeds I was almost always on bare ground with dog poop.” Murphy “put two and two together”: Weeds, like many plants, thrive on nitrogen, and dog crap is chock-full of it.

Boulder’s public lands have suffered some wear and tear. The city’s Open Space and Mountain Parks see just under 5.5 million visitors per year, more than a third of whom arrive with one or more canine companions. On some popular routes, narrow footpaths have widened into braided dirt highways. Murphy blames much of this damage on Boulder’s pooch policy, which allows off-leash dogs on the majority of trails as long as they’re within sight and come when called. He argues that, in addition to dumping malodorous weed fertilizer, wandering canines scare off wildlife, hasten erosion, and contaminate nearby watersheds with their waste. “I’m not saying that dogs cause all the problems in the universe,” he says. “But they accelerate those problems disproportionate to their representation in the community.”

Many of his assertions are anecdotal, however. Aside from a number of studies showing some species-specific impacts on wildlife, there has been little reliable analysis of the effects of passive recreation, such as hiking, mountain biking, and dog walking, on natural environments. And as with the debate over a host of controversial environmental issues, the existing research often serves to feed dueling interpretations of the data. “Yes there are weeds. Yes there are dogs,” says Lori Fuller, vice president of Friends Interested in Dogs and Open Space (FIDOS), a Boulder dog-advocacy organization. “Does that mean dogs cause weeds? That isn’t clear at all.”

What’s clear is that there’s a lot of dookie out there. The city estimates that dogs download around 60,000 pounds of waste on Boulder open space each year. And while Boulder has more important matters on which to expend its civic energy—couch-burning epidemics, disease-ridden prairie dogs, a rash of overtraining injuries—the dog issue reflects the impassioned debate over what kind of footprint this self-consciously green city should leave on its 43,000-plus acres of open space.

Meanwhile, even Murphy’s detractors admit that his barking has changed the way the city views canine incursions on its treasured lands. Before Murphy came along, few open space visitors saw anything wrong with leaving behind some steaming plant fertilizer. Today, even the city’s most strident dog-freedom-fighters pick up after their hounds — although some leave behind smelly plastic newspaper baggies for later disposal. In the most recent revisions of its open space management plan, the city has barred dogs or enacted leash laws on an increased proportion of Boulder trails, and as of July dog “guardians” will have to watch a 10-minute video and purchase an off-leash dog-tag or risk a ticket.

While Murphy is pleased with the changes, he won’t hang up his GPS until the land has healed. “I vowed at the very beginning to follow this thing through,” he says. Which means Boulder hasn’t heard the last of its illustrious turd-fighting botanist.

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