Dog Owners Are Planning to Create a Sea of Poop at a Far-Right Rally Site

When members of right-wing group Patriot Prayer hold their rally in San Francisco's Crissy Field this Saturday, they're going to have to watch where they step. Bay Area pet owners have launched their own kind of peaceful protest against the "free speech" rally by making sure their dogs drop a bunch of deuces on the park grass beforehand.

A San Francisco artist who goes by the name of Tuffy Tuffingson first dreamed up the canine land mine plan while walking his dogs and thinking about the recent violence in Charlottesville.

"My dogs were doing their business," Tuffington recently told Washington Post, "and I was struck with the image of a bunch of alt-right folks stomping around in a field of poop."

So he threw together a Facebook event called—appropriately—"Leave Your Dog Poop on Crissy Field" and invited a few of his pals. "Leave a gift for our Alt-Right friends," the event's description reads. "Take your dog to Crissy Field and let them do their business and be sure not to clean it up!"

The pet poop protest plan spread fast. As of Friday, about a thousand people claim to be "going" to the event, with 5,700 "interested" in leaving little coiled gifts for the right-wing protesters. Tuffington plans to come back Sunday, after the rally, to "clean up the mess and hug each other."

Patriot Prayer has denied claims that it's a white supremacist group, saying that the rally will be a "day of freedom, spirituality, unity, peace, and patriotism" with no Nazis, white nationalists, or extremists welcome. But last June's Patriot Prayer rally in Portland, Oregon, included numerous members of the city's white supremacist scene, according to Southern Poverty Law Center, and the event erupted into violence as group members clashed with far-left counter-protesters.

Patriot Prayer's rally permit from the National Park Service bans guns, helmets, pepper spray, flagpoles, and weapons from the event. That means rally participants will probably have to leave their Auggy Dogs at home, and will have to find a twig or something if they have to scrape shit off their shoes.