I’ve heard a lot recently about popular human foods that are deadly poisonous to dogs. This lists includes coffee, onions, chocolate, and garlic amongst several others. So this got me to wondering if the reverse situation has common examples as well. What can Fido eat plenty of and safely enjoy, but the same would send us humans to the hospital or to that great dog park in the sky?
Poop?
Um… I’m not sure poop is actually A-OK for dogs…but I suppose I could be wrong. They do enjoy eating it. Just can’t imagine it is any safer for dogs to eat feces than for humans to do the same.
Poop isn’t toxic for humans or dogs, or for anything much else. The main problem is transmission of parasites or disease, not toxicity per se.
Ahh, well, that’s why I put a question mark after it. Enlightened now, thank you. 
Not so much ingestion (although I suppose it would be OK, too), but dogs tend not to be sensitive to urushiol oil, going leaping through creekside stands of poison oak/ivy with abandon on off-leash hikes and bringing itchy misery back to whichever sensitized human comes into contact with them next. Ask me why this is on my mind this summer. :smack:
P.S. Generous application of Tecnu followed by throwing a stick into the river works well for quick decontamination.
I’d read lower stomach acid pH allows them to eat with abandon “off” meat that would send you or I to the ER …
Actually the opposite is true.
The paper discusses fasting gastric pH and implications on using the dog in research as a human model. Canine gastric pH was a little higher.
I remembered that the Antarctic explorers got Vitamin A poisoning from eating dog liver. So I looked it up, most carnivores can tolerate a higher level of vitamin A … so a dog can eat dog liver.
(
Ugh! Thanks Kayaker. Obviously I should resist passing along half remembered comments from questionable sources.
TL;DR, but are you saying that we can eat nastier spoiled meat than dogs with no ill effects, or that we have lower pH in our stomachs, or both?
This is not what I expected. I mean, my four dogs tend to gobble up whatever dead thing they come across…and I don’t notice any ill effects on them. Yet I always assumed that if I chomped down on days old roadkill, I’d suffer from the experience.
Gastric pH in humans has been shown to be lower than in the dog. Whether that has any impact on handling “spoiled meat” I haven’t a clue. I’m a wee bit of a gourmand, myself.
I do understand that my dog will occasionally eat fecaliths because they
contain undigested nutrients or bacteria that the dog intuits as good for her
gut.
What I don’t understand is the gastronomic appeal of a possum that has been
run over a hundred times and stinks to high heaven. I have watched my
Australian cattle dog relish the chewing of a rotted crackling possum pelt
with total abandon. Could there be some undiscovered garnish or sauce in
the dust of a hundred rubber tires ?