Entremaneurs
When people tell Kyle Breyne that his job is shitty, they mean it literally. A full-time “scooper” with Pooper Scoopers (877-K9 WASTE, thepooperscoopers.com)—an Oswego-based company that specializes in the removal and disposal of pet waste—Breyne and his sister, owner Kandra Witkowski, make their business picking up dog and cat…um…business.

“We find everything in poop,” reveals Breyne. “Socks, toilet paper, crayons, Barbie heads. At the holidays, we find tinsel, Easter grass, candy wrappers, G.I. Joe figures. We had one client that had a couch they were getting rid of and they left it in the back yard. The dogs chewed it down to the springs. There was stuffing in poop all over the backyard. There was more white than brown!”

Also known as turd herders, goop troopers, crap collectors, feces finders, excrement eliminators and doo-doo disposers, the five full-time professional pet-waste removal specialists of Pooper Scoopers collect approximately 473 gallons of poo per day spread across 135 yards in Chicago’s suburbs. Trolling each yard with a standard gardening spade and hinged dustpan, each scooper covers four to six yards per hour, collecting so much waste that it weighs down their vehicles.

“One of our drivers was carrying so much poop that he bottomed out at a railroad crossing,” recounts Witkowski. “Technically, if we were in a car accident, we may have to call hazmat because we’re carrying so much waste.”

Thankfully scoopers don’t have to carry waste for long. After a hard day of poo collections, scoopers dump their waste in a specialized Dumpster that’s disposed of by a pet-waste rendering service. Witkowski says her organization fills four industrial-size Dumpsters with poop each week.

As for the people who spend day in and day out collecting that waste, Breyne says they quickly get used to the smell, the gut revulsion, the phobia of going home covered in feces. After they get used to the unwritten rules—always wear waterproof shoes, hang on to your cell phone while scooping, leave poop shoes on the porch at home, never simultaneously eat chocolate and scoop—the mere fact that their work is shit stops being important. However, family and friends can’t always forget so easily.

“Nobody’s ever come up to me and said that I smell bad,” Breyne says, “but one guy’s girlfriend didn’t know what he did for a living and told him, ‘Oh my gosh, you smell like poop!’ This was after he had showered and all that stuff. I don’t know if he was sweating it out of his pores or what.”

Poop sweat is just one of several enemies scoopers encounter. In addition to the stench of excrement, the weather presents an array of obstacles ranging from soupy “poop juice”–covered yards that cause scoopers to slide through their work, to frozen feces that must literally be hacked from the ground. Despite the challenges, Witkowski says the scoopers work regardless of the weather.

“We go in because it’s a gross job and someone has to do it,” she says. “We go in because life without us would be crappy.”