Journalists and pet dogs have a lot in common. Good reporters are always on the lookout for news and seek to leave their mark on the world. Dogs, especially smaller ones close to the ground, insist on smelling everything – every pole, corner of buildings, and bush – to find out which other dogs were there, their age, and even gender – and leave drops of urine there to mark their territory to say, “I was here!” After all, possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses compared to only six million in humans, and the part of a canine’s brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is about 40 times larger than ours.

So it’s natural that this veteran journalist – health and science reporter – has a three-year-old, five-kilo, heterochromatic (one blue and one brown eye) shi-tzu dog named Sheleg who enjoys collecting the “news,” walking and even running together for an hour early every morning in our Yefe Nof/Beit Hakerem neighborhood. As Sheleg apparently has keen vision and watches nature movies on TV for an hour at a time, she can see other dogs and poles to smell from far away. The only problem is that a minority of residents in the neighborhood – comprising Beit Hakerem, Ramat Beit Hakerem, Givat Beit Hakerem, and Yefe Nof – own about 900 registered dogs out of 15,000 in the whole city.

And they generally don’t bother to clean up after their dogs have pooped. They either forget to bring a plastic bag, are lazy, have pains in their knees, o.