Composting Dog Waste?

[hoodat]

Black soldier fly larvae will take care of dog poop as well as meat and fish scraps. They're found in every state and the composter can be made from parts you can find in any building supply store. the larvae are valuable chicken food and great fish bait. Black soldier fly will not get in your house or fly around you outdoors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kjNvE5IOdw

 

[lesa]

I have done the doggy septic tank idea. I think it is a very good one. The main problem I had (besides having 4 very large dogs), was that in a effort to get the poop far away from the house, I also put it far away from the water supply. If you can add water daily (or at least a couple times a week) it works great.
As Pat says, nothing wrong with just burying it- nature will take care of it. Let us know how you solve this...

 

[Mackay]

If you do Bokoshi composting method with live microorganisms you can put your dog poo in there. You can also put in meat scraps and bones.

I do the Bokoshi method and have put bones and meat scraps in but not dog poo. We have 8 acres and I ain't going looking for it!

Anyway, this is a composting method from Japan. They compost all their human waste in a similar method. There is a bokoshi thread on here somewhere with full details. I love it!

 

[kyle]

i have been composting dog poop for a couple years now. the big thing is to try and keep it form going anaerobic. Dog poo composting, if working well, wont stick bad.

If you have the space (we have 2 medium sized dogs and need about a 10x10 foot area).

Take the poops and put them on concrete, or wood/plastic/metal. anything that stays dry and bakes in the sun. keep in a sunny spot. We live in the "city" a bit, and use our roof for this, its a flat roof which may not be like your area. after about 4-8 weeks, depending on the amount of poop and the intensity of the sun it starts looking more frail. use a stick and it should be kind of crumbly. At this point we bury and mix it with dirt and leaves to keep air levels up and bury it in a hole. We plant fast growing annual kind of plants that dont seed heavily. Usually some kind of nice looking, not weedy, morning glory. this helps keeps bacteria and such in the root areas which seems to help decompose the poop better. every year teh plants are cut down and laid ontop of the area to also compost. after 2 years a 3x3x3' hole looks like nothing more than compost. and this way it never gets stinky. except when first drying it.

we used to just dig holes and fill. but we found that, especially after rains, it would compress down and become anaerobic and all the nasty bacteria start to make their presence. which is fine, but the smell isnt nice and this matters if your in a city type area and have neighbors.

We just moved recently and have an abandoned fenced field next to us...so we do teh obvious super lazy method of "shoveling it over the fence" now lol. But we did fence in teh area we shovel to so no kids play there. its about a 20x10' area super filled with weeds, so the poop decomposes really fast.

i love that idea of a doggy septic tank! IN fact, why cant we just add them to our own septic tank (if you ar eon septic rather than sewer)? The process is all the same, and i bet the poop eating bacteria and such are not so species specific... Could it be done to have a few bendy pipes (to avoid smell, just like houses are plumbed) and just dump the doo into your tank and spray the hose down to clear up and stragglers? what an incredibly fun idea! thanks for posting that.

 

[Shiloh Acres]

Could it be done to have a few bendy pipes (to avoid smell, just like houses are plumbed) and just dump the doo into your tank and spray the hose down to clear up and stragglers? what an incredibly fun idea! thanks for posting that.

LOL I laughed when I read that.

Interesting idea. I have an aerobic septic system with a lid on the riser. I COULD dump it down there, but I have no idea if that's wise.

I might eventually develop something but right now I have one (admittedly VERY BIG) dog and 2 cats, so I just bury it in shallow pits in the yard. Often just take the shovel and turn over the bit where the dog does his business. I've been doing that for a year in some pretty thick soil with a few very wet periods and no problem at all so far.

I don't know folks' opinion of the gardening guy Garrett out of Dallas Tx. He writes a ton of organic gardening books. He mentioned composting pet manure, but I do know he said folks would have to make up their own minds. If I DID decide to purposely create compost from it, I would be using for ornamentals and not edibles. However, I am QUITE sure that at some recent point coyotes and probably other wandering predators have surely pooped where I now garden. They are everywhere, as are the cats (or they were before I got my dog) so I'm sure there are traces, at the very least.

 

[kyle]

i think the big differences between natural meat eaters and pets is first concentration. a coyote may poop once in a 100square foot area and roam on out of there. pets are always dumped there, probably a couple times a day. also the diet, which depends on what we feed, but im sure there are some kind of health risks with digested pet foods. though i am not sure. E. coli comes to mind.

a friend of mine who runs a very large specialty cactus nursery uses dog poo as fertilizer in potted cacti (obviously not for eating). his process is sun bake for 3 months until they turn white. then he fries them up in a huge outdoor wok to "kill the bad stuff" as he puts it. then its good to go. i laughed the first time i saw it, but you cat beat the results with the plants... he cooks quite a lot as he has a dozen or so guard dogs for his farm, so he has huge sacks of cooked dog "pellets" for his cacti and succulents. so its really great fertilizer for plants if you get past the human health barrier.