I mostly walk my dogs off lead in the new forest so the problem doesn't arise very often; when she is off lead I can see that she had stopped to squat and have a poo and can deal with it accordingly. However occasionally I don't feel like donning the wellies and squelching my way through the boggy sodden forest walks (there has been a lot of rain lately), so this morning I lead walked them through the village along the pavement.
On the way back I was horrified to see 5 small mounds of dog poo (which had a colour and consistency familiar to me!) over a 6 feet stretch of pavement. Worse still two of the mounds had already been trodden in . I strongly suspect they were my dogs so I picked them up as best as I could - but there were a couple of patches of residue left behind where they had been squashed . I tried damage limitation by covering them with leaves. A man with a pushchair walked past and gave me a severe look (oh ground, swallow me up)
The problem is that clearly my dog had just decided to poo as she walked along - she hadn't paused to break her stride or to squat, so I had been completely unaware of this until I retraced our steps on the way back. She had a phase of doing this as a pup but I thought she had grown out of it. Clearly not.
If she is going to do this it is going to be untenable to lead walk her at all - but I would like to have that option still available to me. Is there some way I can train her out of it? It's not a question of waiting until she has had a poo before we go out - she seems to have an unlimited capacity for pooing - since she had been before we went out!