Once upon a time, I had the privilege and pleasure of raising a puppy for the Lion’s Foundation Guide Dogs in Oakville Ontario. Shoe was a terrific dog; intelligent, attentive, and willing. Cheerful, playful, but serious when it was time to work; affectionate and loyal.
Early indications were that Shoe had only one bad habit. He was a chewer. He destroyed the wood moulding along the floor in our kitchen. One day when I left him the car for ten minutes while I went into the drugstore, I returned to find that the whole of the back of the driver’s seat had been ripped out and destroyed. Apparently he had found a loose thread, pulled and then just went for it.
Ultimately it was of no consequence, because before we could file an insurance claim and have the seat replaced, one of our teenage sons decided to go for a drive in an ice storm and the car was totalled anyway. Gee golly, things just have a way of working out, don’t they?
Hey, I’m a ‘glass half full’ kind of gal.
We lived in a house with a walkout basement, which meant the wraparound kitchen windows looked out from one storey above the backyard. I was sitting at the kitchen table one sunny morning, watching our three dogs at play in the yard. Shoe stopped and sniffed some poop that had been freshly deposited by one of the other dogs. Then suddenly, in a moment I can’t unsee even thirty years later, he gulped it down with apparent relish.
I shot out of my chair, emitting something between a scream and a high pitched whine of horror.
This man y’all? Just witnessed his dog eating fresh poop.
My gorge rose and for a minute I thought I was going to lose my breakfast. I raced out to the yard, expecting to see Shoe vomiting back the vile substance or writhing in his death throes from the toxic waste. He just wagged his tail and invited me to play. He also offered me a kiss, but for reasons which I’m sure I needn’t elaborate, I declined.
I called our vet and described the situation, wondering if I should bring Shoe in to have his stomach pumped or something. In a soothing voice, I was told that lots of dogs do this, and there was almost certainly nothing to worry about.
With the iron self-control that is my hallmark, I refrained from screaming the first response that popped into my head: “Really? Maybe I should just start serving it up to him at meal times then? I can use the money I save on dog food to pay for the therapy I now need from witnessing this!”
Years of experience showed that our vet was right.
Lots more dogs do this than you know. Because poop eating is something dog owners don’t talk about when they meet their friends in the dog park and boast about how clever and amazing their dogs are.
The phenomenon of copraphagia (the science-y name for shit eating) has not been widely studied. The most frequently cited research is a report presented by a professor at the University of California, Davis in 2012 to the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behaviour. It involved 3000 dog owners. It found that 16% of all dogs are serious stool eaters (defined as having been caught doing it more than five times). One in four dogs involved in that study had been caught doing it at least once.
Can you predict which dogs will do it? So you can avoid adopting one of them? Because this is a vile and disgusting habit?
Get a poodle. None of the poodles in the study ate poop. Neither the General nor I can remember ever seeing a Poodle eat poop at the pet resort either.
Poodles have too many other problems to concern them..
Neutered males are more likely to eat poop than intact males. Spayed females are the most likely to be copraphagic.
38% of the Border Collies in the study and 40% of the Shelties were culprits. Those figures may not mean much. I wasn’t able to find the original study online, so I don’t know how many Border Collies or Shelties were in the group.There may have been only ten Shelties in the study for example, which would mean that four of them were poop eaters. By contrast, if there were two hundred Labs and twenty of them were poop eaters, that would only amount to 10%.
From personal observation of a variety of breeds of dogs in the pet resort over sixteen years, our conclusion would be that the biggest propensity towards eating poop was displayed by Labs, Golden Retrievers and German Shepherds. Had we know then what we know now, we would have kept records, and veterinary science would have advanced amazingly. As we didn’t have that much foresight, all I can tell you is that our guess is that at least a third of Labs ate poop, and possibly a quarter of Goldens and German Shepherds.
The high rate among Labs may explain another link discovered by the 2012 study. 52% of the poop eaters also stole food from the table, compared to 27% of the dogs in the study who didn’t eat poop. Although I have seen a few exceptions, in general Labs are as fixated on food as teenagers on sex.
“Ooooh! Beeyotiful butterfly! Wonder what it would taste like.”
Other than that, the study suggested a few other factors that seem to indicate a disposition towards poop eating. The more dogs in the household, the more likely they were to do this. 19% of the poop eating dogs in the study were only children in their household. 24% lived with one other dog, and 30% were from three dog households.
Just because they eat shit and like it doesn’t mean they don’t have some standards.
They will only eat it if it’s fresh. 75% of stools are eaten within the first 24 hours of delivery. No dog will eat poop more than 2 days old.
Aside from this study, there is not a whole lot of solid (see what I did there?) information about this phenomenon. Some dogs eat poop only rarely. Some dogs are absolutely voracious when it comes to eating poop.
We tried to keep the play yards clean, but poop would get hidden when it melted down into the snow where we couldn’t see it. The walking paths were mown, but there was tall vegetation on either sides where poop would get deposited and not always be visible for pickup. Dogs’ noses are better than our eyes.
We boarded one pair of Golden Retrievers who we could barely control on walks if they scented poop. They would pull like draft horses, whining and jumping and going insane with the need to get to that yummy delicious treat.
First thing in the morning, there would be sometimes dozens of dogs pooping within minutes, at a far faster rate than our combined efforts could get to it to pick it up. There were some dogs we kept separate from the others during the first turnout of the day. Otherwise, they would literally put their noses under the butt of any dog we weren’t near. As it passed a stool, they would gulp it down as soon as it made contact with the outside world, before we could get there.
Some dogs only eat poop when frozen – poopsicles.
Some dogs eat only their own stools, but they are in the minority. According to the 2012 study, 85% of poop eaters leave their own stool alone and confine their palates only to the excrement produced by others. Some will only eat the poop of another dog they live with.
Some puppies who eat poop grow out of it, their curiosity satisfied. We boarded dogs who occasionally went through phases of poop eating. Most of the time they didn’t bother but every now and then – a big helping down the gullet before you could even react.
Some dogs will eat cat poop from the litter box or horse and cow droppings if they can get them.
Some poop is more desirable than others.
If a dog is overfed, he will have very nutrient rich waste, which may appeal to the discriminating poop eater. When we boarded dogs at the pet resort who were on a raw meat diet, their poop was an absolute magnet to the poop eaters. I vividly recall getting dogs out first thing one morning, when two of the raw meat eaters had pooped in their room during the night. There was a line up at their door, akin to the foodies lining up outside the newest hot gourmet restaurant in New York City or Paris. Chacun a son gout, my friends.
Most dogs, fortunately, have no reaction at all to ingesting this vile substance. Occasionally, however, there will be one that vomits it back up again in a watery, slimy, stinking mess. Think of things that smell bad. Baby diarrhea. An open sewer. Your local dump (pun intended). Multiply that by a hundred and top it off with a large helping of the smell wafting from the contents of the average teenage boy’s hockey duffle. You will only be remotely approaching the poison gas level emitted by poop vomit.
The only other consequence of a dog eating poop is that they can pick up intestinal parasites from the feces of other dogs. Those parasites can then be spread to you if you allow your poop eating dog to lick your face or even your hands.
But since no one in their right mind would accept an embrace from a dog fresh from the shit pile, this – surely to God?- must happen only rarely.
So, disgusting as it is to watch, try not to worry about it, if your dog is otherwise healthy.
Why do dogs eat poop?
Although it is so common, very few studies have been done, probably because the drug companies and other commercial enterprises don’t see much of a way to make money off of shit eating dogs.
Of course, the lack of actual facts and evidence never stops people from making pronouncements. The favourite go to reason cited by these ‘experts’ for why dogs eat poop is that they have some deficiency in their diet. Some say dry kibble leads to chronic digestive or pancreatic enzyme deficiencies.
The UC Davis study found no correlation between diet and poop eating.
Ignore those pop up ads offering you a fool proof way to stop your dog eating poop. It doesn’t exist. The UC Davis study found that commercial food additives sold to prevent poop eating were effective at best, on 2% of dogs. Punishment, electronic collars and clicker training were equally ineffective.
Hydrochloric acid deficiency has been proposed as the cause. Thyroid. Diabetes. Steroid use (making them hungry). Underfeeding (making them hungry).
Ignore the ‘experts’ who tell you to add MSG or a meat tenderizer with MSG to the diet of the dog whose feces are being eaten. Or put hot sauce on the turds. As someone astutely pointed out, a dog who enjoys the taste of hot shit is not going to be put off by hot sauce.
Anyone who tries to tell you that you can stop your dog from eating poop by feeding her (spayed females are more likely than even neutered males to eat poop) a certain diet, or some weird addition to her diet like kelp or tripe is full of it. “It’ being the shit the dog is going to continue to eat, regardless of diet.
These theories are comforting because, if true, they would give us the clue as to how to stop or dogs from engaging in this repulsive habit.
Sadly, there is NO science to support any of those contentions.
One theory is that dogs eat poop to replenish the good bacteria in the gut. This is based on observations about other species.
Elephants, pandas, koalas and hippos are all born with ‘sterile guts”. They eat their mother’s feces to ‘seed’ their intestines with the bacteria necessary for digestion. Rabbits, hamsters and guinea pigs eat their poop to give it one more pass through the GI tract to absorb nutrients that might have been missed first go round.
It’s an intriguing theory, with no evidentiary proof. I would wonder why, if this is the case, all dogs don’t do it? It seems to be a universal practice among the other species referred to.
An old study can be read to suggest that there may be a possible connection between a vitamin B-12 deficiency and poop eating. This 1981 study showed that fecal microbial activity synthesizes B-12. Taking that fact as a jumping off point, a theory developed that dogs eat poop to increase their levels of B-12.
I have not found anything that takes this further. There seems to be a bit of a fashion just now for B-12 supplements, but none of the claims being made for the virtues of B-12 mention the prevention of poop eating. If the B-12 deficiency link was real, you might expect some anecdotal evidence from someone, somewhere, who got B-12 shots for a poop eating dog, and found as an unexpected side effect that the poop eating diminished or even stopped.
There are a number of theories proposing behavioural reasons for copraphagia, that I for one, find more compelling.
Mother dogs eat their babies’ feces to keep the den area clean. They also lick their babies’ bums to keep the excretory areas spick and span. Mom may smell of poop and this may predispose the puppy to thinking it is good to eat.
The 2012 UC Davis study concluded that this is most likely an ancestral predisposition. The ancestors of our dogs were scavengers. Food was hard to find. Eating poop might just get a dog those crucial few extra nutrients in times of starvation. Those dogs who adopted that behaviour lived long enough to reproduce and pass both their genes and their poop eating habit to their descendants.
Another theory suggests you not let your dog see you pick up his poop. He might reason (correctly) that you want the area to be kept clean of feces. So, being a Good Dog, he will pitch in and help by eating the unwanted stuff.
This doesn’t explain why a dog will only rarely eat poop that is over two days old.
Other theories suggest that stress, curiosity, attention seeking or boredom may be the cause. Some people think they do it because they’ve seen other dogs do it, and they are imitating them. Others say it’s because they were punished for pooping in inappropriate places, so they are eating the evidence of their wrong doing.
Take your pick.
What you can do?
The most obvious thing you can do is to be scrupulous about picking up poop, especially when the dog is young. Don’t give them the opportunity to get started. If they do start, as far as possible, eliminate the opportunity to indulge.
Keep your dog mentally and physically engaged so she’s not bored or stressed.
That’s good advice whether your dog eats poop or not.
You could get your dog examined to see if she has a B-12 deficiency, and try B-12 supplements if that proves to be the case. (If you do this, let me know the results. I’m curious.)
Work on the commands to ‘leave it” and come. Give your dog a little treat every time he poops, or spots an enticing pile left by another dog. Hopefully he’ll start running to you for the treat instead of looking to eat the poop.
Although you won’t always be there, with enough time, patience and consistency, you may at least succeed in inhibiting the response.
Unless you train your dog to poop in the toilet, this is about it.
Bottom line is that despite the visceral reaction we have to the sight of a dog greedily wolfing down fresh excrement, as bad habits go this one is pretty harmless. A lot of dogs do it, they love to do and they’re going to do it, given any opportunity at all.
Get over it.
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