Even the Dogs Are On Something

The Görlitzer Park situation got so cosmically absurd that The Verge covered it. Not a German paper. Not a European outlet. The American technology press, reporting on Berlin’s open-air drug market because it had produced a genuinely international story: dogs were overdosing on the feces of users who treat the park as a toilet.

Vets around Görlitzer and Treptower Park were treating dogs for tremors, circulation problems, dehydration, racing hearts—the full accidental high. A vet near Südstern confirmed it was a real pattern. His clinical recommendation to dog owners: train your animals to stop eating shit. Which is technically sound advice and also the most melancholy sentence I’ve read all month.

Berlin has this particular gift for producing situations that read like satire but are just Tuesday. The city markets itself as this liberated, post-everything urban experiment and somewhere in the middle of that experiment, dogs are stumbling around stoned on junkie waste in a public park. I love this place and I genuinely don’t understand it, which might be the same thing.