# Why do animals eat feces? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 12, 2006, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807 "2006-12-12T13:51:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![brendon\_small](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/brendon_small/32/17101_2.png) [@brendon\_small](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brendon_small)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/1 "2006-12-12T13:51:03Z")
I just let my dog outside. I noticed she was walking around in the same spot for a bit, so I went out and asked her what she was doing. She had a small amount of feces in her mouth and seemed to be trying to figure out where there was more. I scolded her, brought her in, and washed her mouth out, but it got me thinking…why would my puppy do such a thing? Brendon ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/2 "2006-12-12T13:57:33Z")
To gross you out. ---
**Author:** ![lieu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c2a13f/32.png) [@lieu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lieu)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/3 "2006-12-12T14:04:56Z")
She went out as a dog then came back in as a puppy so, obviously, for it’s youthful properties. ---
**Author:** ![Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/73ab20/32.png) [@Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alive_At_Both_Ends)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/4 "2006-12-12T14:09:05Z")
Dunno about dogs, but rodents eat their own dung for the same reason that cows chew the cud - they can get more nourishment out of it the second time through their digestive tract. ---
**Author:** ![BubbaDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bubbadog/32/333_2.png) [@BubbaDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BubbaDog)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/5 "2006-12-12T14:10:45Z")
A friend of mine had a dog that would eat its own poo even though it had plenty of dog food available. He asked his vet for an explanation. The vet said that - Some dogs do it because they are sick and can’t tell the difference in taste Some do it in response to difficiencies in their diet Some do it out of hunger And some do just because they just plain old like the taste My dog, Bubba, has never chomped his own to my knowledge but he did give the cat’s box the buffet treatment once or twice during his puppy phase. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/6 "2006-12-12T14:11:22Z")
[QUOTE=Alive At Both Ends] Dunno about dogs, but rodents eat their own dung for the same reason that cows chew the cud - they can get more nourishment out of it the second time through their digestive tract. [/QUOTE] Assuming a pet is well taken care of, wouldn’t it get the nutrition it needs from its regular food? Is feces-eating so ingrained that they do it even if they don’t need to? ---
**Author:** ![Renee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/renee/32/287_2.png) [@Renee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Renee)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/7 "2006-12-12T14:11:24Z")
Only a minority of dogs do this (although they seem to universally love cat turds). Your vet can give you a food additive that tastes really bad (yes, you would think the poop would be bad enough…) to the dog, and that usually trains them out of it. Probably the earlier the better, in terms of habit forming. ---
**Author:** ![Renee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/renee/32/287_2.png) [@Renee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Renee)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/8 "2006-12-12T14:12:31Z")
Um, make that a food additive that makes\*\* the poo \*\* taste really bad. The goal is not to stop producing poo entirely. ---
**Author:** ![brendon\_small](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/brendon_small/32/17101_2.png) [@brendon\_small](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brendon_small)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/9 "2006-12-12T14:32:57Z")
Well, she might be youth-seeking, but she is only a year old (maybe a year and some months) - plus, she’s a small dog, so she’ll always be a puppy to me (says the guy who now has a pug-mix dog and is used to large dogs). She’s never been around cat feces unless it was when we were on vacation and she stayed with my parents/in-laws. She’d also never had human food up to that point and wouldn’t beg for food if you were eating. They fed her human food the whole week, so now she begs - maybe they let her play with the cats? I know she has a good diet of dog food, plus the occasional stolen piece of food off of my plate (I caught her doing this yesterday as well). Health-wise she should be ok. We went to the vet about 2 weeks ago and there were on problems at all. She did have a fight with parvo as a young pup, maybe 2 months-4months old, but since then, hardly ever sick (The parvo came from our larger dog, Rocco, who also ate feces…he was given away since our landlord said “one dog in the new apartment”). I know that she could have been hungry. She last ate around 1 in the morning, and I took her out about 30 minutes before I posted. Most of the time inbetween was spent in bed. I thought maybe it could be chalked up to curiousity. I may be calling my vet about these additives… Brendon ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/10 "2006-12-12T15:04:27Z")
Dogs eat feces because there often is some nutrition remaining in them due to incomplete digestion. Pigs and vultures do this as well. As to why they are willing to eat “bad-tasting” things, as anyone who has owned a dog realizes, dogs have a completely different standards for what tastes or smells disgusting than humans do. [QUOTE=Alive At Both Ends] Dunno about dogs, but rodents eat their own dung for the same reason that cows chew the cud - they can get more nourishment out of it the second time through their digestive tract. [/QUOTE] Not rodents, spefically, but rabbits (which are not actually rodents). Rabbits do not have the fore-gut fermentation system found in cows and other hoofed animals, and need to cycle their food through their digestive system twice in order to get its full nutritional value. ---
**Author:** ![Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/73ab20/32.png) [@Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alive_At_Both_Ends)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/11 "2006-12-12T15:21:28Z")
[QUOTE=Colibri] Not rodents, spefically, but rabbits (which are not actually rodents). [/QUOTE] Rats are rodents, and they certainly eat their turds (I used to keep rats, so I know this). ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/12 "2006-12-12T15:25:27Z")
[QUOTE=Alive At Both Ends] Rats are rodents, and they certainly eat their turds (I used to keep rats, so I know this). [/QUOTE] However, they do it for the same reasons that dogs and pigs do - because they contain nutrients - not for the more specific digestive reasons that rabbits do. I was addressing that aspect of your post. Rats eat feces because they _like_ to, not because they _have_ to. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/13 "2006-12-12T15:59:38Z")
Seconding **Colibri** ’s point, if _rodents_ (mice, squirrels, guinea pigs, agoutis, porcupines, etc.) eat feces, it’s not an obligatory thing, but one done because they have a sense of taste weird by human standards. But lagomorphs (rabbits, hares, and pikas) evolved a third strategy on getting adequate nutrition out of leafy matter. Ruminants and tylopods evolved cud-chewing and foregut (multi-stomach) fermentation as a means of extracting all possible nutrition from their chosen foodstuff. Perissodactyls (horses, zebras, asses, rhinos, and tapirs) use hindgut fermentation, with a rather complex intestinal tract, to accomplish the same results. But the lagomorphs use a third strategy: they eat their chosen browse, let it pass through their digestive tract once and produce “clean” tan pellets of densely-packed leaf matter in lieu of feces. They then eat these pellets to get a second pass, with moisture and enzymes working on the partially-digested foodstuff between the two cycles, to extract the remaining nutrients, producing the characteristic dark brown “rabbit pellets” that are in fact feces. ---
**Author:** ![diggleblop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ac91a4/32.png) [@diggleblop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/diggleblop)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/14 "2006-12-12T16:17:00Z")
I’d like to post a rider with this question. Why do some animals roll around in the carcass of other dead animals? I’ve seen dogs roll around in the carcass of a dead fox and dead skunk on two occasions. ---
**Author:** ![ChipsNDip](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ad7895/32.png) [@ChipsNDip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ChipsNDip)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/15 "2006-12-12T16:39:45Z")
[QUOTE=diggleblop] I’d like to post a rider with this question. Why do some animals roll around in the carcass of other dead animals? I’ve seen dogs roll around in the carcass of a dead fox and dead skunk on two occasions. [/QUOTE] Our dog does this with dead birds - it’s happened twice now, and nearly got him kicked out of the house permanently by my wife. I’d like to know the answer as well, and if there’s any way to train him not to do this. ---
**Author:** ![AskNott](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asknott/32/5790_2.png) [@AskNott](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AskNott)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/16 "2006-12-12T16:40:50Z")
Some folks say dogs roll in dead stuff as a way of covering their own doggy aroma. If the dog were a working predator, it would be useful for stalking game. Most pet dogs, as Lieber and Stoller said, “ain’t never caught a rabbit,” so that reason gets a little thin. I think dogs are just twisted. They’s preee-verts, I tell ya! Pree-verts! ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/17 "2006-12-12T16:55:46Z")
[QUOTE=diggleblop] I’d like to post a rider with this question. Why do some animals roll around in the carcass of other dead animals? I’ve seen dogs roll around in the carcass of a dead fox and dead skunk on two occasions. [/QUOTE] I suspect it’s most likely to disguise their own scent from potential prey when hunting. The prey may pick up the scent of decay first and overlook or at least be distracted from the scent of the predator. Lions roll in elephant dung, probably for the same reason. (On preview I see that **AskNott** has already mentioned this.) [QUOTE=Renee] (although they seem to universally love cat turds). [/QUOTE] Cats, as nearly exclusive carnivores, have a relative inefficient digestive system and their feces therefore probably contain more nutrients. Dogs are more omnivorous than cats and can probably extract these. Feces are eaten mainly by omnivores (dogs, pigs, rats), which eat the feces mainly of carnivores or other omnivores. There’s probably not enough available nutrients in herbivore feces to extract. A colleague of mine did a study of coprophage (dung-eating) food-chains among fish. He found that the feces of species with a more nutritious diet were preferred by coprophageous species. [Organic and caloric levels of fish feces relative to its consumption by coprophagous reef fishes](http://www.springerlink.com/content/u22454g779j113j5/) (pdf) ---
**Author:** ![Uncommon\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Uncommon\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uncommon_Sense)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/18 "2006-12-12T16:58:33Z")
We just got an American Eskimo puppy and she snatched up a freshly laid turd from the cat box. I caught her as she was swallowing the remains and there was still one left in the cat box that hadn’t been covered by litter. Talk about stink. It might be the cat food we use but our cats do not have pleasant smelling crap and I can’t see how this material could be the slightest bit appetising for any creature but the dog seemed to enjoy it. Later that day she puked up the crap and re-ate the puke before I could stop her. Yum!! No idea why, but dogs seem to enjoy this sort of thing. This same puppy dug up a dead bird carcass (dead for about a year I’d guess) from the back yard and brought it to the back porch, in several pieces. Pretty gross. Dogs will try to eat anything, that’s how I look at it. ---
**Author:** ![bouv](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bc8723/32.png) [@bouv](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bouv)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/19 "2006-12-12T17:03:42Z")
[QUOTE=BubbaDog] My dog, Bubba, has never chomped his own to my knowledge but he did give the cat’s box the buffet treatment once or twice during his puppy phase. [/QUOTE] This just goe to show how perverted _I_ am. When you said cat’s box, I didn’t immediatly think litter box, I thought you meant the cat’s _box_, if you catch my drift, and I was like :eek: ---
**Author:** ![Bearflag70](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Bearflag70](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bearflag70)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2006, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807/20 "2006-12-12T17:18:44Z")
I have a 5 month old dog/puppy and every time I let him out, he would make a mad dash for a flower pot that had soil in it but no plants. He would start sniffing and rooting around in there. I figured he just liked to dig and liked the texture of that soil. After a while, I kept wondering why, if he was just digging, would he run straight for the flower pot every time he went out? It turns out a neighborhood cat would use it as a litter box, and my pup was enjoying the nuggets the cat left behind. My pup was not only enjoying it, but he was looking forward to it every time he went out. I turned the flower pot upside down. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-animals-eat-feces/383807.md?page=2)