When I was a boy, maybe around 7, living in suburbia as a latch-key kid, the back yard was an important part of life. I could run, play with the dog, kick a ball around, etc.

My mother wanted a garden, so she took up about 1/4 of the backyard with that, and soon I got the chore of cleaning up the dog’s poop. There was a corner of the yard where it was dropped into a decoratively covered hole by a young version of me. It was some novelty or the other that only a knowing eye would discern that it marked where the poop went. I did this with a ‘pooper scooper’, all the rage in the 1970s for people tasked with picking up poop.

Soon, I wasn’t a big fan of the backyard. It was a place where I picked up poop, and nobody really enjoys that, particularly when they’re 7 and the world is full of far more interesting things. My father decided to get a tractor tire and fill it with sand so that I could have my own sandbox for myself and friends to play in, making the area better to play in.

This seemed like a good idea, and it was pretty fun for a few days.

It was fun until a neighborhood cat found the sandbox. I never actually saw the cat, but when visiting the sandbox, that a cat had been there was readily apparent. Being used to this from the dog, I cleaned it up and tossed it where the dog poop went, but it became a chore just getting the poop out of the sandbox and – since we didn’t have a cat – I didn’t know why that scent of ammonia clung to the tire even though all visible traces of poop were gone.

I was 7 and completely unaware of magical litter boxes that cats used. In fact, I didn’t even know that it was a cat. I just knew there was poop that needed to go away.

In time, it became unmanageable because apparently that cat told it’s friends, and I ended up seeing cats come into the yard, flinging sand all over as they covered their sandbox surprises. They were being cats, their owners were being owners of inside-outside cats with no care for where their cats took their potent poops, and there I was at 7 watching how uncaring people had cats that, as long as they pooped somewhere else, it wasn’t their problem.

On Mastodon yesterday this all came to mind when someone equated walled gardens and ‘enshitification’. It’s pretty much how it works, it seems, at least in the broad strokes.

You might have a walled garden, but your neighbors with cats don’t care about their cats taking dumps in your sandbox. If you build it, they will come.