A street artist in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice is turning mounds of abandoned dog poop into tiny works of social commentary.
For weeks, local residents say, pieces of poop on the side of the road have been marked with small white flags, each with a unique, aggrieved message for those who fail to clean up after their pets.
“Get therapy,” reads one. “Must be nice to be such a lazyass,” reads another. “Why get a dog, then?” asks a third.
While the identity of the Venice poop flagger is still a mystery, the person is already becoming something of a folk hero to people who live on the residential blocks around hip Abbot Kinney Boulevard, not far from Venice Beach.
“I have no idea who it is, zero clue,” said Ava Carpentier, a longtime resident who was walking her dog, George. But, she said, “it’s brilliant. I think it’s hysterical. I’d like to shake the hand of the person who’s doing it.”
The style of the flags that have appeared over the past weeks is consistent: white paper, with a sharp message written in black marker. On a tour of the neighborhood on Monday, a Guardian reporter documented five separate flags on mouldering piles of excrement, some with simple messages such as “Pick. Up. Your. Poop!!” and others more passive aggressive: “Life is hard if you can’t afford poop bags.”
“I’m a big fan,” said Will Inbusch, who said he often shares a chuckle with a neighbor as they pass one of the flags. “No one wants to see a bunch of dog poop everywhere.”
His favorite two flags, Inbusch said, read “who raised you?” and “c’mon, you’re better than this”.
“From the handwriting, I assume it’s one [person]. I can’t imagine there’s a coordinated team of people who do all that,” Inbusch said. He had few guesses as to the identity of the guerrilla flagger: “Just someone with a good sense of humor and solid handwriting.”
The proliferation of dog droppings in parks, yards and neighborhoods is a problem in many locations around the world, and one that may only have worsened during the pandemic, when many people adopted new dogs. Fecal bacteria is “rampant” on the streets of New York City, and a “deluge” of dog droppings may also be harming nature reserves, researchers have warned. Attempts to police this excrement epidemic range from fines to signs asking dog owners to “be respectful” or warning that there is no magic “poop fairy” to pick up their droppings. The issue remains a profound social flashpoint, a constant reminder of what it means to respect, or disrespect, public space.
At first, several Venice residents said, they assumed the flags had been placed on the poop by a particular homeowner or business owner upset about their particular lawn. But as they began to see the poop flags scattered across the neighborhood, they realized that this was part of some larger endeavor.
“I don’t know who’s doing it, which makes it even cooler,” Clare Ramsey, another local resident, said, as she walked her dog, Charlie. “Is it one person? Is it a crowd of people? When are they going out?”
“Sometimes it helps me out, I’m not going to lie,” said a postal worker delivering mail in the neighborhood, who declined to give her name. Seeing a little flag “has stopped me” from stepping in poop, she said, a frequent risk In Venice, “where a lot of people have dogs”.
Residents said they were still guessing about the identity of the person, or people, behind the flags. Was it someone out walking their own dog, carrying the flags with them as they went?
Does the flagger hand-make the flags “with little toothpicks?” Carpentier wondered. Or were the flags mass produced, perhaps designed for labeling party hors d’oeuvres?
“I think that more than one person is doing it now,” the Venice postal worker said. “It’s catching on.”
Ramsey said the effort didn’t seem menacing but rather “conceptual”, with the flags reminding her of the distinctive tags of graffiti artists.
But it was also possible, this being Los Angeles, that the poop flags were part of a deliberate marketing campaign. “Is it some brand?” she asked. “Is it someone just looking for notoriety?”
Residents said they had started texting photos of their favorite flag sightings to friends and family, and that at least one person had photoshopped a flag perched atop a disintegrating piece of poop so that it read “Trump 2024”.
“Nothing like a good sense of humor and a cause,” Inbusch said.
