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“For every person you ask about this, you get a different opinion. Because they’re guessing, whether they’re veterinarians or experts in behavior,” said Hart, the lead author on the paper, which was published in the journal Veterinary Medicine and Science. “You don’t want to say to a client, ‘I don’t know why they do it.’ “
And those experts get asked about it a lot, because for many dog owners this is a foul and intractable problem. While gulping down turds at the dog park is typically not dangerous to the pooch, Hart said the mere idea — not to mention the resulting potty breath — is so revolting to some owners that they’re willing to give their poop-eaters away. “People can be quite tolerant of even aggressive dogs,” he said. “But put this one out there, and they’re really intolerant.”
So Hart and his co-authors hoped their two surveys, which were completed by nearly 3,000 dog owners, might yield some useful data on the problem. The researchers found no evidence tying coprophagy to age, dietary differences or compulsive behaviors such as tail-chasing. Frequent stool-eaters were also just as easily house-trained as other dogs, which ruled out the idea that they were simply more comfortable with poop than peers with more refined tastes.
But more than 80 percent of the coprophagic dogs were reported to favor feces no more than two days old. Hart believes this taste for freshness suggests a cause that goes back more than 15,000 years — to dogs’ wolf ancestors.
