A certain substance is enjoying a renaissance in New York City. In a time of scarcity, it is newly abundant. In a period of economic inflation, it is free and distributed so generously that it might even be on your shoe right now. The substance is dog waste—and lots of people are mad about it.

In response to an uptick in complaints, the city’s Department of Sanitation announced in 2022 that it would crack down on human delinquents who leave behind their canine companions’ droppings. In a statement at the time, the sanitation commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said there would be greater efforts to enforce the $250 fine currently on the books. As part of the fanfare, City Councilmember Erik Bottcher unveiled an awareness campaign informing New Yorkers that “there is no poop fairy.” However, in 2022 the city issued only 18 tickets for failure to pick up dog waste. In 2023, complaints to the 311 hotline about it have risen by 17 percent.

The best part of our dog poop press conference was the groan of disappointment when I announced there is no Poop Fairy. In all seriousness, I want to thank @nycsanitation for agreeing to my request for more Pooper Scooper Law enforcement officers in Council District 3. pic.twitter.com/X5Lq38biid

— Erik Bottcher (@ebottcher) April 24, 2022

New York City Councilmember Julie Menin has also been on the receiving end of a grievance deluge. She told me that her office has been “flooded with complaints” (just a “tremendous amount of complaints,” she said) about what her constituents perceive as an increase in sidewalk waste. Most of the complaints were about the areas around schools: kids stepping in it, strollers wheeling in it.

[Read: Dog poo, an environmental tragedy]

Menin shared with me a recent study in which researchers found an average of 31,000 fecal bacteria per 100 milliliters of puddle water from New York City’s sidewalks. “In comparison, a public beach would be shut down” at such levels, she said.

Though I’ve never been under the impression that New York City puddles are a clean place to swim, I agree that having so much fecal bacteria splashing around is suboptimal. In fact, although I haven’t done the polling, I’m comfortable assuming that most people would prefer to keep unplanned encounters with feces at a minimum. And yet it remains an issue across the country. New York isn’t even the city with the worst dog-waste problem; according to a 2023 survey that measured complaints made on Twitter, that honor goes to Seattle.

This issue obviously has more to do with humans than with dogs, who cannot pick up after themselves and are, in fact, perfect. But humans know better. So why is humanity seemingly unable to solve this problem?  

That people should bear the responsibility of cleaning up after their canine friends seems a given now. The obviousness of it reminds me of an argument I once had with a college roommate who claimed the dishes his visiting girlfriend left behind in the sink were not his responsibility. Well—whose responsibility were they, then? (I’m still angry.) But the expectation that people will pick up after their dogs is relatively new, and was at first seen by many as completely ridiculous.

In 1978, New York State passed a law that said, “It shall be the duty of each dog owner … to remove any feces left by his or her dog on any sidewalk, gutter, street, or other public area.” Although the so-called poop-scoop law wasn’t technically the first of its kind (Nutley, a small New Jersey suburb, passed one in 1971), it is the legislation most often credited with the American public’s shift in attitude toward dog waste. Alan Beck, New York City’s director of the Bureau of Animal Affairs at the time, succinctly explained its impact in a paper published in the journal Environment in 1979. “When something happens in New York—and it works—it becomes world news,” he wrote.

I spoke with Beck, now a professor of animal ecology at Purdue University, in Indiana, about the struggle to get the law passed. One of the most vocal proponents of the law at the time, he said, was Fran Lee, the leader of the activist group Children Before Dogs. Lee was particularly concerned about Toxocara canis, a species of roundworm sometimes found in dog feces that can become especially harmful when ingested by children. (The specter of children eating dog feces is somewhat of a running theme in the dog-feces activist community.) Lee believed that dogs should be required to relieve themselves exclusively within the confines of their human’s apartment. Though her views were extreme—Beck recalled attending a talk she gave in New Jersey, at which she was pelted with bags of dog waste by an opponent—John Lindsay, New York City’s mayor from 1966 until 1973, sided with her, at least insofar as he believed dog waste was a problem in need of a legislative solution.

Lindsay proposed a pick-up law in 1972 and was met with outrage. Some animal-rights groups opposed it, fearful that forcing this task would lead people to abandon their dogs, or worse: that acquiescing to this law might embolden the city to ban dogs altogether, a future some saw as Fran Lee’s ultimate goal.

[Read: Is it okay to let my dog sleep in my bed?]

The proposal didn’t pass, and Lindsay’s term ended. The scooper movement didn’t get its win until Ed Koch was elected in 1977. Right before he took office, State Senator Franz S. Leichter and Assemblyman Edward H. Lehner got the law passed at the state level. The law, which applied to cities in New York with populations greater than 400,000 (meaning only New York City and Buffalo), stated that those who failed to pick up would receive what was at that point a $25 fine. Part of Beck’s job was to explain to residents that the law was “not anti-dog”; he argued that waste-free streets would be healthier for dogs, and would make dog ownership be seen as more acceptable (that is, to landlords and Fran Lee types).

Though it isn’t possible to quantify the exact amount of dog waste on sidewalks at any particular moment, Beck told me the law seemed to turn things around rather quickly. “Within the first few months,” he said, “people started, whether it’s real or perceived, to feel that things were better.” Now the once-radical proposition is the norm in much of the country.

With decades of scooping behind us now, it’s frustrating that the task is still an issue that necessitates citywide PR campaigns. Most people who don’t pick up must understand that what they’re doing is wrong. They know they’re leaving behind an unsanitary nuisance for their neighbors and, if they do it in their own neighborhood, themselves. So why do they do it?

The German sociologist Matthias Gross was curious about the motivations behind these delinquents, so he dedicated 10 years to essentially stalking them. Posting up in parks in different cities at various times of the day, he observed the behavior of humans who did and did not scoop, looking for patterns; these eventually ended up as a report—“Natural Waste: Canine Companions and the Lure of Inattentively Pooping in Public”—in the journal Environmental Sociology.

“I just found that whole phenomenon, from a sociological perspective, so fascinating,” Gross told me. He found that people were less likely to pick up early in the morning, but some of those same non-scoopers would scoop in the afternoon. In his report, Gross suggests that people might not actually care about keeping the parks clean as much as they do about being perceived as good citizens. It brings to mind the concept of the tragedy of the commons—the idea that people tend to act selfishly when given access to something communal, in this case shared social spaces. But if everyone acted selfishly, that communal resource would be ruined.

To cover up the fact that they were neglecting their responsibility, Gross wrote, many non-scoopers pretended they weren’t aware of what their dog was getting up to. (I have personally seen this particular move many times.) “I saw how dog owners use the iPhone to pretend they were not seeing what the dog is doing,” he told me, adding that the devices “help very much to strategically pretend that you do not know what’s going on.” Indeed—in this situation and others.

But, of course, we can’t actually know what these people were thinking. Gross’s report was limited primarily to observation, in no small part because when he approached dog owners to discuss why they chose not to pick up what their dog had just expelled, many of them yelled at him. Someone would need to find a way to get inside their minds.

When she was a grad student, Clodagh Lyons-Bastian, now a lecturer in the department of communication at North Carolina State University, sought to be that brave soul. When a citizens advisory council she was involved with in Raleigh, North Carolina, started getting angry complaints about dogs fouling up a park where local kids played sports, she decided to look more closely at why it was happening.

In a self-reported survey of 1,000 local dog owners, more than 60 percent claimed that when they left waste behind, it was because they didn’t have a bag. Other main categories were because of external circumstances such as rain, or because they were in a wooded area and thought they could just push it to the side and move on. “There wasn’t really anybody who said, ‘I just didn’t do it because I don’t care about my community,’” Lyons-Bastian told me.

[Read: How dogs make friends for their humans]

But when those same people were asked why they thought others left behind dog waste, they judged them far more harshly. “Have you heard of the fundamental attribution error?” Lyons-Bastian asked me. This is people’s tendency to attribute their own actions to the environment or things otherwise out of their control, and others’ actions to their character.

The second part of Lyons-Bastian’s survey focused on what might motivate respondents to pick up more frequently. She found the answer was not fines, nor was it scolding. Instead, it was employing the psychological concept of social proof, which suggests that people are influenced by the decisions of those around them: “If the people in your community and in your circle are doing something, you’re much more likely to do it.” Conversely, if you think other people aren’t doing something, it’s easy to wonder why you’re bothering to do it yourself.

Dominic Packer, a co-author of the book The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony, has also found this to be true. “One of the things that motivates people to comply with the norm is a sense of identity,” he said. Messaging that New Yorkers are people who pick up after their dogs—unlike the people from all of those other loser cities—might do the trick. What does not work, he said, is emphasizing the number of people who are behaving badly, which suggests that behaving badly is the norm. This is unfortunate news for all of those flashy press conferences.

For a city with an estimated 500,000 dogs, compliance in New York is evidently great. No matter how annoyed New Yorkers might be at the sight of stray feces, they must admit that they are not encountering it at a rate of half a million times a day. Maybe instead of a sign scolding those few dog owners who ruin it for everyone else, what would really be helpful is a sign that says: ISN’T IT WONDERFUL HOW WE’RE ALL PICKING UP POOP?

Though many attribute the perceived increase in dog waste to the pandemic, which appeared to temporarily cause an increase in dog purchase and adoption, Julie Menin, the city councilmember, thinks the problem is, in fact, sign-related: the product of the city removing its dilapidated curb your dog signs in 2013 and not replacing them with new ones. “The expectation was that people would clean up after their dogs” without the signs, she said. “But that just proved not to be the case.”

Menin launched a contest for residents to design a new sign, which she plans to hang up across her district. The winner was announced on June 12: a cartoon image of a doggy Statue of Liberty holding a bone and a shovel, with the slogan, Clean streets for all. Pick up after your pup! Not as good as my sign suggestion, but still cute.

I asked whether she thought anything below 100 percent compliance would be acceptable to her complaining  constituents, and she didn’t answer, instead emphasizing that “it really can’t get worse than it is now.” (Unfortunately this is in direct conflict with a central law of universe: “It can always get worse.”)

I don’t think that expecting cities to be completely free of dog waste is reasonable, nor do I believe that human inconsiderateness can be legislated away entirely. There will always be outliers: those without a bag, those who genuinely did not notice what their dog was doing, those with other complicating factors that we are not privy to. And there will, of course, always be assholes. The problem is intractable because humans are imperfect.

So though it’s natural to focus on the poop you just stepped in, it might be healthier (and more effective) to put a greater focus on all the dog waste you never encounter in the first place. Most dog owners are out there doing their neighborly scooping, and they’re just as annoyed as you are by those who aren’t. Band together with those people to say, “Yes, here in [the place in which you live] we proudly clean up after our dogs … unlike that loser city Seattle!”