Pure Finder
Wikimedia CommonsThe pure finder hunts for dog poop in the sewers.
Don’t be fooled by the name for this position — a pure finder was anything but an enjoyable job. Being a pure finder during the Victorian era in England required whoever was performing the job to collect dog poop found on the street and sell it to tanners.
Leather became very popular in the late 1800s, and in order to soften leather pieces, dog poop was used as a softener of sorts. Dog poop was known as “pure” because of the cleansing and softening effects that it had on the tough leather fibers.
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Pure hunters scoured the streets for stray dog droppings and actually made a decent living doing so. When the job was first introduced in the 1830s there weren’t as many pure finders working so there wasn’t much competition.
But by the late 1800s, more people started to hunt for dog feces, which in turn lowered the price that was paid for the product. There were only about 30 tanneries in operation at the time, and too many people took up pure finding for it to be as lucrative as it once was.
The supply of pure finders outgrew the demand for the feces as new solutions emerged and eventually the job became unneeded.
