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First, a trigger warning to readers who share my profound squeamishness where certain bodily functions are concerned: what follows will make reference to the eccentric bowel-emptying habits of our seven-year-old mongrel, Minnie.
I must also issue an advance warning that I will be using the infantile words 'poo' and 'poo-bag', which I loathe.
The trouble is that I know some readers find the more grown-up, earthier Anglo-Saxon alternatives offensive.
So in deference to them, I shall stick to the baby-talk now widely regarded as acceptable.
With those warnings out of the way, I'll get on with it.
Oh, how my heart goes out to the woman who has been fined £100 by some jobsworth of a council enforcement officer for walking her Welsh springer spaniel through Northampton town centre without carrying a poo-bag.
Heaven knows, I share every decent citizen's disgust at dog-owners who fail to clean up after their pets. Indeed, there's nothing I find more revolting than a pile of dog mess on the pavement or in the park – nothing, that is, apart from stepping in it by accident. String up the guilty owners, I say.
(I must stress that this is not a serious suggestion, since I would hate to be hauled before the courts myself for incitement to violence. You just can't be too careful what you write these days. But certainly, guilty owners should be fined.)
However, what is different about the case of that poor woman in Northampton, who wants to be named only as Paula, is that her dog had not fouled the pavement. No, she was issued with that on-the-spot fine simply for failing to produce a waste bag when the enforcement officer demanded to see one.
As she told the BBC: 'She [the dog] had already been out for her business that day and it was a very short walk through the town centre, so I knew that she wasn't going to do anything.
'Unusually, I didn't have any bags in any of my pockets, and so I was unable to say that I had a poo bag with me. So what happened? I was fined on the spot, £100 for a poo she didn't do.'
Though the enforcement officer was 'polite', she said, he was also 'very firm'.
'I honestly thought I would be given words of advice, told off, told what the law was so that I knew for next time, but there was no movement.'
All I can say is that there, but for the grace of God, go I – and many other dog owners who might also be unaware that in some council areas, it's an offence to be caught walking a dog without a poo-bag, even when there's no need for one.
What's more, it's apparently punishable more severely these days than a great many cases of shoplifting or even some crimes of violence (and if you're an illegal immigrant and convicted sex offender, of course, you risk nothing worse than being packed off home with £500 spending money in your pocket, courtesy of the British taxpayer).
All of which brings me to Minnie's eccentric habits. At the beginning of our walks, she always has her one and only poo of the day, as soon as she's released from her lead in the park. Coprophobic though I am, I never fail to pick it up in a poo-bag and bin it.
Then, as we set off round the park, she invariably has four or five phantom poos, squatting down as if straining for a stool, though nothing more ever comes out.
But passers-by don't realise this, and so to pre-empt their dirty looks I go through an elaborate pantomime of scrutinising the grass beneath her rear end, before throwing wide my arms and shrugging my shoulders to signify: 'There's nothing there for me to pick up.'
(Another of her eccentricities is that she does hand-stands when she wees, balancing on her front paws with her hind legs in the air, like an acrobat in a circus. Perhaps other dogs do this, though I've never seen one. But this is by the by.)
It's just as well that I never need more than one poo bag, since those of us who use the handy plastic dispensers that come free with Amazon Basics never know if there's more than one left on the roll.
But then if we ever run out and find ourselves needing a bag, we can always be sure of being able to cadge one off a fellow dog-walker.
A fat lot of good it would do me, however, if I tried explaining any of this to a bloody-minded council enforcement officer. But then who cares about justice, fairness or common sense, when there are juicy revenues to be harvested from responsible citizens who are ignorant of little-known regulations?
Of course, going unequipped with a poo bag is far from the only ludicrous, lucrative offence to be exploited by councils to fill their empty coffers, since legislation introduced in 2014 empowered them to impose Public Spaces Protection Orders.
Just ask poor Bercu Yesilyurt, who was fined £150 by Richmond council for pouring coffee down a drain – or Victoria from West London, who suffered a whopping £400 penalty after a letter addressed to her, but which she claimed she had never received, was found in a fly-tip.
Or the five-year-old girl left sobbing after she was fined £150 for selling 50p cups of lemonade on her street in Tower Hamlets.
True, the fines in these cases were eventually rescinded, but not before the victims suffered a great deal of anxiety and palaver.
Other victims of this madness include the grandmother in Bath who was fined £150 for littering after feeding pigeons a sausage roll, and Kleo Papas, a Londoner on a work trip to Birmingham, who claims he was left 'gobsmacked' after being hit with a £100 fine for dropping a strawberry stalk down a drain. He had no idea that this was an offence, he says, until he heard a voice saying: 'I got that all on camera.'
Yes, I know it's a mistake to look back on the Britain of my youth through rose-tinted glasses, as if every council official and bobby on the beat (remember them?) was blessed with a strong sense of fairness and common sense.
But this was an age before traffic wardens outnumbered full-time soldiers in the Army, and before cash-hungry councils employed legions of jobsworths to enforce an ever-growing mass of petty regulations.
Isn't it at least fair to say that in those good old days, hardened criminals had a great deal more to fear from the authorities – and honest citizens a great deal less?