Pretty funny; see here (this will download a PDF), or see this Southeast Texas Record story. Thanks to Dennis Johnson for the pointer.
Pretty funny; see here (this will download a PDF), or see this Southeast Texas Record story. Thanks to Dennis Johnson for the pointer.
stefan says:
I’m sure the judge is indifferent about deer or humans shitting on his lawn.
May 27, 2010, 8:12 pmEugene Volokh says:
I take it that the judge’s point is that there’s a difference between a forest and a lawn.
May 27, 2010, 8:36 pmSplunge says:
And perhaps between crapping (or allowing your guest to crap) on your own lawn (or forest) and someone else’s.
May 27, 2010, 8:52 pmHarold says:
Men in the wild, (anywhere without malls and honey-do lists), like to mark their territory. Not having facilities is a feature not a bug. Case closed, unless they’ve wipe with chigger infested leaves.
Good hunters cover over their leavings so as, and only, not to alert quarry.
May 27, 2010, 8:58 pmJohnF says:
This shows the importance of judicial experience for a Supreme Court nominee. How are we to know how Kagan would have decided this?
May 27, 2010, 9:15 pmJim Rhoads says:
Are you shitting me, Stefan?
May 27, 2010, 9:22 pmGlenn Bowen says:
The question remains, “Is the bear Catholic?”
May 27, 2010, 9:31 pmSarcastro says:
This is why snow was invented.
May 27, 2010, 9:37 pmD.O. says:
I am not familiar with hunting lodges, but in case of hiking cabins it was my experience that the lack of appropriate nearby facility quickly leads to deterioration of the surrounding territory. Maybe deer, bears, and other animals do use toilets after all…
May 27, 2010, 9:40 pmChris Travers says:
So this is why White House says Bears part of blame in Senate loss…
(sorry, couldn’t help it)
May 27, 2010, 10:24 pmAnonymous EE student says:
Joking aside, the complaint does allege that the owner “is planning to extend plumbing into a creek next to [the] cabin.” Considering that cattle grazing near spinach fields caused a nationwide E. coli outbreak in 2006, this seems like a substantive concern.
May 27, 2010, 10:48 pmArchitectJS says:
I’ve done a fair amount of long distance hiking and I cant say that this is the case. When evidence of “defecating in the woods” is found it is usually a TP bloom only, with no residual waste.
May 27, 2010, 11:14 pmShelbyC says:
I dunno. I hate jerks who don’t have the decency to bury the stuff. Espesially in the desert. There’s not much that’s worse than comming across a turd with a stream of tp next to it.
May 27, 2010, 11:23 pmEvilDave says:
… and the Bear said, “You don’t come here to hunt do you?”
May 27, 2010, 11:41 pmwhat says:
Mr V,
The complaint alleges that the property owner was going to install pipes that would, apparently, dump raw human sewage into a creek.
It is disappointing that you think the judge’s zingers are more striking than his failure to take this complaint seriously.
I suspect that if you had property downstream from this, you would not think it is funny at all.
May 27, 2010, 11:59 pmSecond Amendment Sister says:
Does anyone complain successfully about men marking their territory in doorways in the city?
May 28, 2010, 12:28 amKirk Lazarus says:
My experience in of defecating in the woods in Australia was that burying it would only have made it harder for the blowflies to make it disappear (which took no more than four hours). This was in summer, winter would be a different story.
May 28, 2010, 1:13 amMikee says:
A suitable solution might be to end the pipe from the cabin facilities in a pit, especially dug for the purpose, either empty or filled with large rocks, with a large flat stone or cement slab over the top. The house I was raised in has such a device that is still functioning just fine after 50+ years of use, originally by an extended family of 2 grandparents, 2 parents, and six kids. We six kids used an amazing amount of toilet paper while growing up; I am sure a mere group of hunters would not overtax such a system with their paper products. This system used to be called a “septic tank” where I grew up in North Carolina.
An even simpler approach is to dig a deep pit, then build a small shed (for privacy) over it. The “outhouse” shed (or “privy” as they used to be called) usually includes a board with a hole in it, mounted horizontally at a height suitable for defecating into the pit while seated. While Sears catalogs are a thing of the past, phone books might be used to provide suitable paper products for hygeinic purposes. In high school, one particularly rural young lady was teased about using corn husks in the outhouse at her home. She insisted that was a vile lie.
May 28, 2010, 1:15 amBawlmer Immigrant says:
A few decades ago I lived for five years in a row house across a gully from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. The row house was built in 1917 or so, and faced the gully. Across an alley behind our street of houses was another street of even older row houses.
Several residents were the elderly children and middle aged grandchildren of original owners of these houses; at least three houses on these two streets held original owners themselves!
One very elderly original owner from the houses behind ours used to mock the equally elderly and equally delightful owner of the unit next to ours with the following: “I remember when our outhouse was located where your house is now!”
Not on topic, but I don’t get to trot this old chesnut out very often.
May 28, 2010, 1:21 amneurodoc says:
In Boston, home of the bean and the cod, social stratification was reflected in the old ditty about the Lowells who spoke only to the Cabots, while the Cabots supposedly spoke only to God. But in Baltimore, it was indoor plumbing that marked one as truly upper crust. And before Michael Bloomberg bought the naming rights for a reported $50M, Hopkins’ school of public health was known as the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, usually shortened to just Hygiene.
May 28, 2010, 2:50 amkdackson says:
Could be worse:
http://www.chinahush.com/2010/05/19/woman-relieves-herself-in-street-of-shanghai-in-broad-daylight/
May 28, 2010, 6:37 amDr. K says:
^^ That was me
May 28, 2010, 6:37 amReaderY says:
Spoken like a Limestone cowboy.
May 28, 2010, 9:16 amReaderY says:
Happens.
May 28, 2010, 9:19 amrarango says:
Reader Y: (what) happens? :)
May 28, 2010, 9:35 amJay says:
To clarify something, a “county judge” in Texas is typically not a judicial officer, but basically the equivalent of chairman of the county commission in another state.
May 28, 2010, 9:36 amBasil says:
I imagine that sensibilities are different these days, but as a young man in the Far East back in the 1960′s, this was a rather common sight. Perhaps the only difference is that they would do it over a “binjo” — an open sewer — running along the sides of the streets.
May 28, 2010, 10:01 amDr. K says:
Personally, I saw a kid relieve himself on the floor under a clothes rack in a fairly upscale mall and young parents squeezing their baby on a public street to empty him,
And Friedman says we need to emulate the Chinese.
May 28, 2010, 10:10 amShelbyC says:
Interesting. Around here it takes alot longer than four hours.
May 28, 2010, 11:31 amChrisIowa says:
If the cabin is lightly used, the most environmentally friendly place for urine and feces is on the ground. Good dirt is already an excellent absorptive material for the assimilation of this material, soil is very rich in bacteria and other organisms that break down the waste. If fecal material is buried, the processes involved in the breakdown will shift to the slower anaerobic processes. Burying the feces is more a courtesy to the aesthetics of the other human users of the area. The natural environment doesn’t care.
When a particular area is used too intensively, the amount of waste exceeds the capacity of the soil. This is when privies and septic tanks become useful. However if those are dug too deep, so that the waste comes into contact with the groundwater, coliform and other bacteria can be spread more than they would if the waste were just left on top of the ground. The benefit of those is to move the waste underground where it cannot be seen and to minimize human contact with the waste, and thereby controlling the spread of disease. They have the undesirable effect of concentrating the waste in one very highly impacted spot.
May 28, 2010, 2:25 pmShelbyC says:
Correct. And a welcome one.
May 28, 2010, 3:14 pmJaimeInTexas says:
A friend of mine, during the Cold War, was stationed somewhere in Germany, atop some rock formation, doing intel/communications intercepts. He told me that one of the tasks that had to be performed dealt with drums of excrement. They poured, I think, kerosene into the drum, mixed it all up with a paddle and lit it up. What a job!
There are toilets that burn the stuff and all you get is ash.
May 28, 2010, 4:49 pmDennis N says:
I suspect that either the state or the county has a sanitary code for septic tanks and privies.
That was one of the favorite duties in Vietnam, too. You have to stir it while it burns, or the diesel all burns off the top.
May 28, 2010, 6:02 pmMac says:
Talk about learning a whole lot more about a subject that you ever wanted to know! How do some of you know so much about this subject?
Can we import those to AZ so I don’t have to pick up poop after 3 dogs? Our flies are much, much slower taking weeks to make it disappear. Our AZ flies are lazy bums. I think we should take in Australian blow flies even if they are illegal. At least, they are willing to work!
May 28, 2010, 9:48 pmConservativeWanderer says:
Wow… the citizens of Limestone County, Texas, might actually regress to what was fairly common practice for most of human history!
For those who don’t know, modern sewage treatment has only existed since about the middle of the 20th century. Prior to that, there were a number of methods of dealing with it, from the sophisticated to the simple. And, amazingly enough, humans survived thousands of years with those systems.
May 29, 2010, 10:18 amwhatcrap says:
ConservativeWanderer
Are you really this dense?
Humans also survived many thousands of years without antibiotics, anesthesia, and Nintendo.
Let me ask, would you rather live in a favela with an open sewer trench or where you live now? Why is that?
Dymbass.
May 29, 2010, 1:43 pm