My Dog Eats Poop

It's a comment we hear often. "Help! My dog eats poop. How do I get him to stop?" Well first let's examine why.

Youngsters will generally do strange things because they saw their pals do them first. They will not, however, jump out of a tree or put their fingers in a candle flame after the 1st unpleasant experience. Dogs on the other hand will return to eating dung again, so there needs to be something about it that they like. They will eat roadkill as readily as their dinners. Old trash, pond muck, and dead sparrows on the grass are no less mouth-watering. It's easy to see that dogs are scavengers.

Dogs start getting hungry whenever they sniff something with a strong smell, and dung definitely does smell. Some are attracted to the stools of deer, cows, or horses.

And many dogs are interested in cat droppings, possibly because cat foods are terribly protein rich and the dogs are going after undigested nutriments.

Of course dogs love attention as well, snd they do whatever is required to get it, including things they know you do not like. This likely explains why some dogs only eat dung when their owners are around to look at. It's the equivalent to a 6-year-old uttering a dirty word and then watching for his parents' reaction. He might simply be trying to get your attention.

Boredome may also play a role. When not too much is occurring, they regularly nose round the yard, picking up sticks and putting them down, even mouthing rocks occasionally. Since they are not sickened by the smell or taste of dung, it's yet another thing for them to pick up, play with, and explore. Dogs sometimes eat so much dung that they get sick to their stomachs. That's rare because they have strong digestive tracts. Less rare is the fact that your pet may get worms if it eats the stool of an infected animal.

For one thing, it is a repellent sight that nobody wants to look at.

There's also the incontrovertible fact that dogs who eat dung have heart-stopping bad breath. As a dog owner you must be really forgiving to overlook that

The fact is that no matter how often this is studied, no one is really sure why your dog eats poop. Some even think this behavoir is your pet's way of covering up an accident in the house..

The real question is what can you do about this problem, also known as coprophagia.

Dung-Eating Tip : Vets occasionally advocate adding garlic, canned pumpkin, or Accent beef tenderizer to a dung-eating dog's food. Presuming that it's his very own dung that he is attracted do, these ingredients may give it a taste he dislikes - even though it's tough to imagine that anything could make it taste worse than it already does. This is not an ideal solution, but it does work for some dogs. There are also commercial products you can add to your pet's food. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. Just as no one is really sure why a dog eats poop, no one has come up with the ideal solution either.