“Lawn Order in New Zealand (and Elsewhere)”

During my 1988 visit to New Zealand, I came across an article with the wonderful headline “Lawn Order” in Listener , the weekly Kiwi television and radio program guide. The article asked whether “a bottle filled with water and placed on your lawn will deter passing dogs from leaving a calling card.”

Sounds ridiculous, right? But this bottle-on-the-lawn tactic is serious stuff Down Under, having spread swiftly from Australia to New Zealand and become an article of faith in both countries. It may not be exactly an urban legend, but it certainly is modern folklore.

Everywhere I went in New Zealand I saw bottles of water scattered about on the neatly tended lawns. And everyone I asked about this told me that he or she had heard from someone that it was a sure-fire way to prevent dogs from doing their business on the lawn.

The bottles were the familiar 1¼ liter plastic soft-drink containers. Only clear bottles seemed to be used, though sometimes the paper labels had been left on them. I was told that residents of some of the ritzy suburbs put out water in glass bottles that originally held expensive wines and liquors.

To me, the water-bottle idea seems almost as silly as the preventive used by some people in the States: if they see a dog coming onto their lawn, they stand near the front window and cross their fingers, then supposedly the dog will refrain from relieving itself.

The crossing of the fingers has an air of what anthropologists used to call “sympathetic magic.” Like the effects of the water-filled bottles, so the crossed fingers symbolically lock up the dog’s functions, as if the pooch had crossed its own back legs.

The usual reason given for the supposed success of the bottle technique is that a dog will not foul its own drinking water.

But dogs know nothing of water in plastic bottles. So some people who scatter the bottles across their lawns say that it’s the glitter of the bottle or the dog’s seeing its own reflection in the water that does the trick. Others claim that the bottles themselves repel dogs, and the water is just there to keep the wind from blowing the bottles off the lawn.

In search of the truth, Listener sent reporter Denis Welch out to study the matter. Welch chose the town of Napier on Hawke’s Bay, North Island, as the site for his research. “The answer to all life’s problems can ultimately be found in Napier,” he explained. “And it also has the best Italian restaurant in the country.”

I, too, visited Napier. I couldn’t find the restaurant, but I saw plenty of water bottles on tidy lawns. But then I saw water bottles in virtually every New Zealand town I visited. Lawn order seemed to be a national mania, though perhaps not quite a sign of the “uptight anal-repressive tendencies of small-town New Zealand,” as Denis Welch suggested.

A letter to the editor of the Auckland Herald suggested that the message of the water bottles was directed not to the dogs, but to dog owners: “I don’t want your dog fouling my yard!”

At another point in my visit, the Wellington Evening Post ran a more serious piece on the subject. They quoted one veterinarian who called it “one of the most stupid things he has ever heard” and another who said that “he saw one hound present his offering on top of a bottle.”

But one Australian vet who was also quoted insisted that the tactic works, if done properly: “The full territory has to be enclosed with bottles, the water must not become stale, and it must be shaken regularly to give off the right vibrations.”

As I read the article, I wondered aloud whether the litter of plastic water bottles scattered so liberally about a lawn wouldn’t be just as offensive as an occasional doggy dropping. I commented to my wife on the remarkable naï veté of local people, wondering how anyone could think that bottles of water on the lawn would have any power over the neighbor’s doggy.

And my wife said, “But I’m sure I saw water bottles on lawns in our neighborhood back home!”

I don’t recall every seeing such a thing, although we used to have a big dog that our neighbors probably would have liked to ward off.

I left it to my readers, asking if any of them had heard of this lawn-order stuff. Does it work? And if so—why?

Postscript: I immediately got four letters from California in response to this column. One reported glass and plastic water bottles used on lawns as a dog deterrent in San Diego in 1983 and 1984; no explanation of how (or even if ) they worked. The second letter described bottles of water scattered on lawns in Santa Cruz during the late 1970s, the “bottle of choice” being institutional-sized condiment jars placed in the approximate center of yards. Walking to work in San Jose the morning he wrote me, my correspondent spotted a row of water bottles on just one lawn there. Letter number 3 was from Los Gatos (which seems like a town with a funny name to have a dog problem); same thing there, though: glass and plastic jugs filled with water are thought to repel canines. The fourth letter, from Wayne Bernhardson of Oakland, reported as follows:

After hearing of your research with water bottles on lawns in New Zealand and elsewhere, I thought I should inform you of my own brief field experiment on this topic in West Berkeley, where such bottles were fairly common, several years ago. While walking my dog, a 90-pound Alaskan malamute, through the neighborhood, I asked a middle-aged black woman her rationale for having them, and she replied that they were indeed intended to keep dogs off her lawn. One subtlety she brought up, however, was that to do so one had to place either mothballs or ammonia in the bottles to discourage the dog, which, of course, has an extraordinarily acute sense of smell .

This seemed at least plausible, although I was not completely convinced of the efficacy of such a system. My skepticism proved justified when, a block later, my dog backed directly onto one of the plastic bottles and left one large turd delicately balanced on top of it .

So far, I got just one reply from elsewhere, a note from Dr. Reinhold Aman of Waukesha, Wisconsin, who reports water bottles used to repel rabbits in his neighborhood.

I’ve walked a lot around Salt Lake City since my return from New Zealand and still have not seen this particular form of lawn order in operation here. But I have a feeling that my findings on this matter will not end with these few facts.