If you've got a dog and you live in the big city, you know the joy, the delight, the intimacy that comes from putting a baggie over your hand and picking up a steaming, squooshy deposit from the Bank of Canine Digestion, whose holdings seem endless. You know the pleasure of having that soft, stinky mass ooze like unsavory bread pudding between your plastic-sheathed fingers while you gag and think, "Damn, Rover, what the hell have I been feeding you?"

You also probably recall that one time (or two or eight or a hundred times) that you just couldn't handle the feeling of that body-temperature butt-nugget in your hand -- so you just kept walking, leaving the foul-smelling pupu platter to become one with the Vibram sole of some cursing urban deathrocker's Doc Marten. Shame on you! A poop upon your innards!

Luckily, there's the Poo Poo Master. The Poo Poo Master is an inexpensive ($7.95) pair of plastic tongs not unlike those you would use to turn Polish sausages on your backyard barbecue. For another $12.99 you can get a package of 35 "Doggie Walk Bag" capsules, which are one-inch plastic capsules containing a folded-up plastic bag specially designed to fit the Poo Poo Master. These fine bags have odor neutralization properties and, best of all, they have an "opaque color to mask contents of bag." After all, when you try to pick up on that hot rollerblader taking a rest on a park bench, you don't want to be standing there holding a bag of shit, right?

But if even the Poo Poo Master is more contact with the former contents of your mutt's colon than you, personally, can handle, you might want to go for the clever cardboard alternative: the Scooper Doggie ("The SCOOP of the CENTURY!"). The Scooper Doggie is a flattened cardboard package that you fold into something not too unlike one of those mailing tubes you used to send that poster of a bikini-clad Pamela Anderson Lee to your 12-year-old cousin in Wichita. The Scooper Doggie has a pointy end so you can discretely usher that gushy turd into biodegradable safety without actually touching the pesky thing.

A 25-pack costs just $6.49 -- so it's economical, too. I'll thank you, Rover will thank you, and all the urban hipsters out there wearing expensive footwear will thank you.

Thomas S. Roche, a city dweller, is intimately concerned with the defecatory habits of urban canines. He operates a free email newsletter about his writing; send email to thomasroche-announce-subscribe@onelist.com to subscribe.