During a walk around the neighborhood I noticed a dog defecating in its yard. Then I was stunned to see it turn around and eat its own feces. I have never owned a dog and don’t know all that much about them, but this one certainly did not appear to me to be a puppy, although it might not have been fully mature. Was there something wrong with this dog that it didn’t instinctively know not to do this? Or is this behavior more common than one would imagine?
Not just scatophagy, but true auto-scatophagy. I’m impressed.
Our dogs do it all the time. We’ve got horses, and every once in a while, they love nothing better that a steaming pile of horse-doo. The fresher the better.
I’ve heard they do it to balance the bacteria in their digestive tract, but that’s just a theory.
Some animals, like rabbits, often depend on scatophagy to survive. They’re not real efficient digesters of food, and a single go-thru often results in only minimal absorption, depending on the coarseness of the food. Adding bacteria in the hindgut for further breakdown, pooping it out, and re-consuming make more nutrients available for them.
What the hell is scatophagy? Perhaps you people mean coprophagy.
Mmmm… kopros… <drool>
Medical dictionaries have both terms. Definition: eating of feces.
Going off on a tangent…
Is it bad to eat your own poop or others poop?
It seems like certain animals don’t get sick from the bacteria that they ingest… but why do others do?
They do it because they don’t get enough fiber because the owners don’t give them proper food.
It’s sure dangerous for people to eat their own poop.
Some animals that eat cellulose (plant material, like grass) have bacteria in their colon to digest it. The problem with this is that the colon is “down-stream” from the major absorption organ: the small intestine. As a result, much of the digestion by the barteria is wasted. By sending it through a second time all of that digested food gets another chance to be absorbed.
Dogs sometimes do it because they lack proper nutrition, or because they get in the habit. Coprophagy is not a necessary thing for a healthy, well-fed dog.
There was a Japanese expedition to one of the poles (north or south, I don’t remember), and when they left the abandoned some dogs there. The following year they returned to find the dogs had survived. The consensus was that they survived on scat.
Did Dali really eat his own? Or have I been listening to Doctor Demento too much? (I think that’s where I heard it.)
Gorillas will do the same thing; though they are vegetarians and just give the plants they eat a second going over sometimes. I saw some footage of a big pot-bellied ape catch a huge, steaming, green cheech & chong dubbie from it’s ass and start chowing down like it was cookie dough (yuck!!), but it’s not all that uncommon in non-humans. A lot of wild animal crap if you look at it still has plenty of undigested materials in it. Look at bear stuff when they’ve been eating berries… that would make a good snack for something.
There’s a John Waters movie, “Pink Flamingo,” in which Divine (a 300 lb. transvestite) eats dog feces.
Quote:
“…What was the big deal? There’s really no delicate way to say this. In the final ten minutes of the film Divine scoops up some dog feces and cheerfully chews away at it. If you can stomach this scenario, there’s really not too much you can’t handle. Watching this film, a first viewing or the fifteenth, is still like watch a car crash, wonderfully horrifying, an atrocious laugh, but still, there it is, a laugh.”
http://www.videoflicks.com/ontheflipside/johnwaters.htm
Doing a google search (john waters + divine + feces) turned up a lot of bizarre sites!