Mmmm, delicious! My lab, likely after a field snack.
My dog is Jasper, he is a 4 1/2 year old black lab. He is a delightful animal. Loyal, energetic, fit, healthy and protective, he is an addition to our family that my wife and I are quite proud of, as well as love very much. However, he is not, sadly, perfect… he has a small ailment that frankly drives me mad, and that of eating poo, excrement, crap, dung, droppings or any other word you prefer.
Generally he eats any; he is not discerning, (or so I thought). Where he and I run, there is a fair array of choice for him, horse manure, cow dung, sheep droppings, presumably badger, fox, and the rarest and sweetest poos (in his mind) of all…. the emergency human poop!! The human variety, for me, is the most foulest (pun intended) of all. I’m always caught off guard; he picks up the scent and goes off (funnily enough), like a rabid dog, that takes an inordinate amount of screaming to vaguely claw him back from the brink. Why I miss this I will never know, perhaps it’s because it’s such a rare situation, that when he does smell it, I’ve totally forgotten about the last time it happend, but the smell and the look of both guilt and glee in his face is both priceless and projectile vomit inducing.
My frustration at this has caused me to look into it a little, and as it transpires there is a name for this condition: Coprophagia. Having learnt that there is a name for this “condition”, I decided to slip down an internet hole - which I quickly regretted, however on the crawl back out, found this interesting article from a chap called the Doglistener (https://www.doglistener.co.uk/dogfood/dogs_eating-poop-poo-coprophagia.shtml) who breaks down the three levels of poop eatery:
Types of poop eating
1. Autocoprophagia: eating its own faeces (disgusting)
2. Intraspecific Coprophagia: eating faeces from within its own species (also disgusting)
3. Interspecific Coprophagia: eating faeces from another species (cat, deer, rabbit, horse, etc) (weirdly manageable, but still disgusting?)
Jasper, is Interspecific… which doesn’t make it any better!! That said however, since learning a little more and in the build up to writing this piece, I’ve been watching him more consistently on our daily runs, and oddly, he is in fact discerning about which crap to eat. (Honestly if he ate all he found, my rubbish running pace would be so much worse trying to pry him away from the bloody stuff every 2 minutes). What I’ve come to learn though, is that he doesn’t like it fresh, and he doesn’t like it too old. It seemingly needs to be just right…. He’s like the bloody goldilocks of the dog poop eating world!!
From this internet hole I intentionally fell down, my best guess is that its not nutritional, we feed him a good brand of working dogs dry food. He goes to the vets every quarter (which he hates), and his weight is bang on. There is always someone at home with him, so it’s not attention seeking, and he isn’t stressed. It could very well be from his mother (he was raised on a farm), and so learnt it from her, but having watched him more intently recently, I reckon he’s just developed a taste for the bloody stuff!
What does this mean though and how can I resolve it? To be entirely honest, I hadn’t been that concerned about the horse, sheep and cow poop generally, because they eat grass and hay etc, but upon reading more there are possible health implications if the crap he is eating comes from an animal with health issues. As it stands this is even more prevalent with the human sh*t, (especially in this new COVID world), add to this also, that we have an outdoor cat that is a vicious predator of small vermin (good), but he needs worming every 3 months because of it, and the dog seeks out his crap too. So, I think, in the first instance, I need to talk to my vet, and then from there see whether it is a course of training or pills, (there’s a flipping pill for everything!), or both.
When I set out to write this it was more as an amusement piece, than anything too serious. But the more I’ve dug, the more it’s opened up areas that I probably need to look further into about the behaviour… so to conclude, there is no conclusion, yet. First stop, (once Covid 19 lockdown is over), the vets and we’ll see where that takes us…. The quest of the poop eating dog is ongoing, stay tuned!