You’d be surprised by just how few good articles are published about poop eating, or coprophagia. Well, someone has to do it, so it might as well be me.
Poop eating is actually quite common. Take my wolf Nashoba for instance. His favorite delicacy is People Poop. Once I was hiking with Nashoba and my neighbor Kirk and his German Shepard in Michigan in the State Recreation Area by our homes and saw Nashoba go under a bush and start digging. I tell my neighbor that he must smell some people poop left by a hunter. And my neighbor says, “Yeah, well yesterday while hiking I needed to take a dump, and that’s where I buried it.” And you wonder why Nashoba has such bad breath. And when I had my previous wolf, Wolfie, I never needed to clean out Mouser’s litter box – Wolfie kept it as clean as a whistle. And you wonder why Wolfie had such bad breath. Now, I’ve always said wolves and dogs are just plain gross dirty animals and I’d never let one in my house, let alone sleep on my bed (See Fig. 1).
Figure 1. Dirty and gross canines. Warning/Public Service Announcement: If you see such a dirty gross animal such as shown above on your property, Shoot First and ask questions later. Never feed one, or you’ll never get rid of it, and NEVER let them into your house and especially onto the furniture. Even with a king sized bed, they won’t leave any room for you, and imagine if someday you actually got a woman into your house ?
But dirty gross canines are not unique in their love of poop. Other animals also feast upon poop: besides dung beetles, there are chimps and cute baby rabbits, and so too do baby elephants, hippopotamus calves and nonhuman primates engage in coprophagia. Even though food has gone through a body and out the other end, there can still be lots of goodies left in it.
Now, the best poop-eating story I learned from another good physicist, Sergie, and it’s about beavers. Beavers eat wood, but it’s not food for them, they can’t digest it. So the wood goes through the beaver’s body, picks up some bacteria and other things, and they poop it out. This is Green Poop. The bacteria then go to work on it, and turn it into Beaver Food. The beaver then go back and eat the Green Poop and then poop out Brown Poop. Now I know why Nashoba spent a good 15 minutes rubbing noses with a beaver down at the lake – both those gross animals must have thought the others breath was just so sweet.
Termites are much the same as beavers and can’t directly digest wood, but they have bacteria in their gut that can. Now, many termites are born without this gut bacteria they need to survive, so where do you think they get it ? You guessed it ! From eating the poop of other termites of course.
Now, personally, I have never developed a taste for poop, and don’t eat it, but I do grow some of my food in it. Here in Brown County, Bear Hardware sells 40 pound bags of composted manure for $2.99. Like, I sure wish I could sell bullshit, and people would buy it.
In Costa Rica you can see long lines of Ants carrying pieces of leaves 100 times larger than their bodies back to their home underground, and so you might think they eat leaves. Nope. They are just carrying the leaves back to their home to feed the fungus that grows there, from which they get food. So, really, half the animals on earth are here only to serve fungus. Even I serve fungus ! I go out and pick Chanterelle mushrooms from the forest, and then carry them back home in an open basket with lots of holes, or an onion bag. Mushrooms are the sexual organs of the fungus growing in the soil. When I carry that basket home, I sprinkle literally TRILLIONS spores along the trail. And it works – you generally find most of the Chanterelles within a few feet of a trail ! See, I have a very important role in the ecosystem; my reason for existing I thought was to eat Chanterelle Mushrooms, sautéed with lots of garlic and onions over pasta with some freshly-ground Parmasean, but it turns out that my true purpose in life is really to spread the spores far and wide. Me and Johnny Appleseed.
So, what does fungus have to do with poop-eating ? I have absolutely no idea, and I even wrote this. If you can figure it out, please let me know. Maybe a fungus made me do it. I work for them, and they, along with the Russians, may have hacked my brain.