My ethics around picking up after my beagles during a walk have never truly been put through the paces. The true test is how a dog owner behaves when no one is looking. When you own a pair of howling beagle brothers, someone is always looking; often, half the neighborhood is. I’d like to think I’d do the right thing in any setting. But I’m not sure I’d want to frequent the L Trail on Mount Jumbo in Missoula where a now infamous vigilante, “armed with multi-colored rolls of plastic pet poop bags he buys by the box on Amazon,” roams the trails looking to shame the locals who leave behind the output of their dog’s behind. The fecal-matter obsessed vigilante has a bark worse than his bite, but the bark has gotten pretty loud. One could argue a man who spends much of his day picking up after dogs even though he’s doesn’t own one has lost his sh-t. Or maybe he’s uncovered a key example that proves people can’t get their sh-t together. “Even if you frequent this trail, you may not have seen the Bag Man—he’s shadowy like that, and crepuscular—but you will have seen his droppings. After every walk, he leaves a printed note at the Cherry Street trailhead surrounded by bags of dog sh-t in red, orange, blue or green. The color changes daily. ‘These are feces left on this trail yesterday, bagged by your neighbor today,’ reads a typical note, printed on white office paper and formatted to reveal an above-average command of Microsoft Word.” In a story that is broadly about community, society, and the complex relationship humans have with rules, Jacob Baynham worked like a dog to stay on the hot and steamy trail of this story and drop a load of knowledge about a man who couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. Dog Duty. (As to why you should give a sh-t about this story: “There are as many as 89 million dogs in the U.S., collectively manufacturing about 24.4 billion pounds of poop each year—more than the weight of 33 Empire State Buildings.”)