A Genius Theory for How Clifford the Big Red Dog's Owner Would Pick Up the Pup's Poop

Clifford the Big Red Dog’s size poses a lot of interesting issues for a pet owner. On the one hand, Emily Elizabeth never has to worry about him getting run over by a car; he’d be the one doing the running-over. On the other hand, how the heck does a regular-sized human deal with Big Red Dog-sized poop?

Neatorama spotted a Reddit thread debating this question and, as you might expect, some people have thought long and hard about this very topic. The thread even includes some major calculations about Clifford's digestive output. The most feasible option, it seems, would be to train Clifford to poop in a dumpster.

Clifford is around 25 feet tall, so based on the average weight and height of a regular lab, Redditor gregnuttle estimated that he would weigh around 87 tons. If Clifford was to poop in proportion to a human, by weight, that would be around 1320 pounds of dog doo a day. According to these calculations, that would be about 423 cubic feet of poo, fitting nicely into a single dumpster.

Thus, the only real answer here is to train Clifford to poop in a dumpster outside your house, and get yourself a private garbage service to come empty it every day. Your home would smell amazing, surely. Who knows what would happen if Clifford had an accident, though.

The real question is: What patch of grass could handle the volume of Clifford’s pee?

A version of this story ran in 2017; it has been updated for 2021.