Ok, this is something I’ve been wondering about for awhile. Somehow, even though I grew up with a dog, I never noticed this until I adopted a dog after I already had two cats. The first thing that struck me as odd, was when I went to clean the cat litter pan, and noticed that miraculously, there was no cat poop. How could this be? Then I got my answer when I surprised Simon one night and realized he was raiding the cat pans for kitty treats — gross! I temporarily put a stop to it by relocating the cat pans, and installing a cat door, so the dog couldn’t get to them anymore. But then we moved to rural Colorado, the poop eating began again with easy access to poop. One of the most disgusting things I saw Simon do was on a hike near Aspen, Colorado to Lost Lake. It was a loop hike and we were just finishing the trail, when Simon had this weird look on his face, like his mouth was full. He then opened his mouth, and out popped a horse turd — yuck!
Being a diligent dog owner, I researched this on the Internet and found out this was nothing new, that many dogs did this. But more importantly, how to stop it? Everything I read seemed to indicate it had something to do with a lack of nutritious diet, and if you fed your dogs the right food, they wouldn’t feel the need to eat poop. So I bought the super-expensive, $60/bag dog food — no luck, still going after poop. I tried canned food, raw food, all kinds of food, and still the incessant interest in poop. In Simon’s case, I chalk it up to the fact that he is literally a canine garbage disposal who will eat anything. We refer to him as our furry Hoover, because anything that falls on the floor in the kitchen is immediately sucked up like an anteater eating ants. He even eats vegetables — radishes, carrots, green beans, lettuce — crunching them up in seconds like they are some sort of delicacy. But our other dog, Shawnee, is much more discerning and doesn’t really like a lot of people food — a very picky dog eater. Despite this, she’s out in the woods, lapping up piles of pellets like they are filet mignon. We have so many wild animals that make their home in our neighborhood — coyote, fox, rabbits, elk, deer — that the two acres surrounding our house are a veritable poop smorgasbord. Their latest obsession is rabbit poop. We take them out for the evening walk, and they immediately want to burrow their noses into a pile of scat.
Why do they eat poop? The theory that seems most logical to me is dogs’ evolution from wolves, and carrying with them the wild pack mentality. Wolves and other wild canines eat as much as they can when they can, because they never know when and where they will find their next meal. So poop is their way of padding their diet, just in case the apocalypse strikes and they won’t get any yummy dog food for awhile. The weird thing is, in spite of the poop diet, they seem more than healthy — Simon is going on 11 years old and seems to have plenty of energy. And Shawnee is the typical, high-energy, Border Collie. So at this point, since I can’t exactly rid the woods of any and all poop, I’ve accepted this is what dogs do. Scat, anyone?
