I have a question regarding cervid scatology, so perhaps some kind-hearted zoologist specializing in this particular field of study could help me out. Specifically, I’d like to know why deer droppings consist of heaps of round pellets instead of the cylindrical logs common to humans, dogs, and other mammals whose excrement I’ve had the misfortune of encountering. Is it perhaps because the deer colon is shaped like a string of pearls, or is there some less fanciful explanation?
I too have wondered at this - I mean, seeing a deer doing this is a rare thing, I have seen perhaps five hundred pellet piles but only one act of scat. Just seeing the piles one thinks - maybe they come out one at a time, and the deer squeezes each one off. Then you see the thing do it and it’s a constant rush of little pellets coming out in a nice neat little pile. Perhaps there are several sphincters - one ledading into the colon which does the squeezing off of little pellets into the big, loose colon which doesn’t smoosh them all back together into a compact mass and then the outer sphincter. I dunno.
Speaking of moose, I briefly witnessed one defacating once. The little pellets don’t come out one at a time, but like, a half-cupful at a time. I cught her unawares & she took off so I got a good view of her hindquarters.
I’m no scatologist but I have witnessed many poopers here in Idaho (what else is there to do?). The turds are definately formed inside the critters and aren’t just pinched off at the outlet.
Come to think about it, I guess I’ve seen turds all along the poop chute when field dressing them.
Goats and sheep also produce pellets, as, I believe, do rabbits.
Since they are all of widely varying genuses, but have somewhat similar diets, my first thought was that it may be related to what they eat as much as how they are built. However, horses and cattle have diets closer to sheep than sheep do to goats and deer (the human-manufactured diets of horses notwithstanding) and their digestive cast-offs are rather different, so I suppose it goes back to the construction of the digestive tract.
When goats or sheep are sick, they are more likely to drop larger, sticky turds, more nearly resembling the output of dogs, so the pellets are actually formed by some specific process.
This site has a description of how a deer’s digestive tract works. Their digestive anatomy is pretty different from ours because they have to be able to digest cellulose, and it sounds like part of their digestive tract forms the partially digested food into little balls that it then passes along to the next part of the tract. I suspect that those little balls stay separate and end up, after being completely processed, as those little pellets. I’d guess that they stay separate because they don’t come in contact with one another until they’re in the deer’s rectum and are too dehydrated to merge together.
Wow. I could just sit here and speculate about sheep proctology all night long.
I’m no expert, but i’m willing to bet it’s some kind of evolutionary thing to throw the scent off their trail.
Since they’re almost always in motion, it makes for easier dispersal of small evidence.
I get a lot of deer scat on my property, and it seems that during the winter the poop is pelletized though not scattered, but in the summer the poop is definitely cohesive. In the winter I use a garden rake and flat shovel to dispose the crap but in the summer I just use a spade.
Mice and rats also drop individual pellets, rather than longer, log-shaped turds or “pies”, as in the case of cows.
Trust me on this one. It’s my job to notice and identify rodent shit.
My guess would be a combination of diet and GI construction/development. It may also have to do with the animal’s foraging habits, developmentally. Keeping the grazing/gathering areas as clear as possibe of mounds of feces.
This is entirely speculative, however. I have no hard evidence.
Well, wolves in the wild do the exact same thing. Presumably, canines do this instinctively, to lose their own scent. Many of the animals that wolves hunt (including deer) have keen noses, and can detect the smell of an approaching predator. But a wolf who’s been rolling around in deer poop may be able to sneak up on a deer without being given away by its odor.
Yeah, but rodent “pellets” are usually cylindrical, not like the round “pellets” left by deer and wapiti. See http://www.bear-tracker.com/animalscat.html for some first-class pictures of lots of different mammal scat. Unfortunately it has little information about why we see such fascinating variety. Note also that the difference between “typical form” and “clustered form” corroborates an earlier post.
Astorian…Loved your answer. Never could figure that one out and I think you nailed it. I’m in the woods every day with my Siberian Husky. She constantly drops her shoulder into deer droppings, falls into it, rubs into it and then squats over it and pees. Today (with a recent snow) she dug down a good ten inches and 're-found an old pile and went into her routine. Funny.