If the dog eats excrement

You took your dog for a walk and just finished bragging to your neighbor how well he is, and suddenly you catch him eating poop! What a nightmare! What makes your pet behave in such a strange way?

Coprophagia (a term for the urge to eat feces) is an unpleasant but rare occurrence in dogs. Good news: The habit of eating excrement is not harmful to your dog's health. The bad news: this is disgusting and your dog has a foul smell from the mouth afterward. There is also a risk of infection with parasites excreted in the feces of other animals.

Curiosity

No one knows for sure why dogs do this, but there are a couple of possible reasons. Maybe they just like it. The dog learns the world with the help of taste buds and teeth, he likes to carry sticks in his mouth and chew toys or bones.

Dogs also like objects with a pronounced odor, and excrement clearly falls into this category. This may sound strange, but perhaps by eating excrement, your dog is learning what interests him.

Puppy confused

Sometimes puppies will eat their own excrement during the period when they are trained to go to the toilet outside. This is because they still do not know exactly where they can and where they cannot go to the toilet. Fearing that they may have done something wrong, they "destroy the traces of the crime." A similar desire for cleanliness can be observed in adult dogs when they are naughty at home.

Mother dogs often eat up their puppies' feces when they lick them. Perhaps this is a residual instinct. In the wild, eating up puppy feces reduces the likelihood of detection by predators.

Nutrient deficiency

One of the common theories of this behavior is the desire to compensate for nutritional deficiencies in the diet. Herbivore feces may contain vitamins that are not part of the dog's daily diet.

A cat's diet is high in protein, so cat litter may be appealing to your dog. Stop the dog from doing this immediately as the litter box can be poisonous to the dog.

Prevention

The easiest way to solve the problem is to immediately remove the excrement after the dog has done all his business. Some owners spray pepper, tabasco, or paraffin wax on the excrement to make it "less appealing".

There are also food additives that do not taste irritating, but after being digested in the gastrointestinal tract become bitter and make the excrement unattractive to the dog. Unfortunately, this method is not effective in all animals.

In general, the best solution to the coprophagia problem is consistent and consistent measures that make the feces less attractive to the dog.

You can also talk with your veterinarian to help identify additional nutritional needs for your pet.