What’s better than saving the planet by walking your dog? Yvonne Faulkner-Grant and husband David do it every day with the four-legged Scruff and it was the 13-year-old Border Collie who started this habit. Due to its habit of playing with all the plastic bottles it comes across, picking them up from the ground, the animal has been nicknamed “eco-dog” – “ecological dog” – and, as the end of the year approaches, the the count of rubbish collected from the streets of Nuneaton, England, by the animal in 2022 has already exceeded 1000.
During walks, Scruff has always loved playing with plastic bottles thrown on the ground by some citizen with little civic sense. A year ago, however, Mr and Mrs Grant, aged 47 and 48, noticed that their dog immediately gave up one bottle for another along the way. In this way, he contributed to spreading the waste around even more and risked making its owners pass, in the eyes of the people, as those who had soiled by throwing the bottles out of the appropriate bins. “This year we decided to collect them all, helping clean the streets of Nuneaton and helping the planet,” the owners wrote on Facebook in early 2022.
And so they did: the couple started taking a bag with them on walks and counting all the bottles collected at the end of the tour, which will then be recycled. «In the whole year he should have taken over 1000 – said Yvonne Faulkner-Grant-. As soon as she sees one on the other side of the road, she looks at us as if to say: “Can I go get it?” ».
The four-legged Scruff has thus earned the nickname of “ecological dog”, but unfortunately it cannot be said that some inhabitants of his city are equally friends of the environment: if in less than 12 months the Border Collie has managed to raise so many plastic waste, means that someone has continued to throw plastic waste on the ground, regardless of the damage caused by such conduct.
