I exercise Bean in parks, fields and woods where rabbits
live but one day I took her to a new location crisscrossed with bridle paths.
On seeing horse manure for the first time, she picked up a bolus, ran back to
me and said, “You have no idea how big the rabbits are around here!!” Then, in
a flash, it was gone. Down her gullet.
Dogs eat poop. That’s wired into their brain circuitry. It’s
part of a discreet “learning centre” in the brain that helps a dog learn what’s
good and what’s not good to eat. (I’ll explain “learning centres in a minute.)
All dogs are hardwired to eat poop but in some the instinct
is firmer than in others. Bean’s breeder warned us when we picked her up at
eight weeks of age that she was a poop eater, the only one in the litter, and
the breeder was absolutely right. As a pup, she’d dump and if we weren’t
hovering to intervene, she’d simply turn around, scoop it up, run back inside,
smile, swallow, and try to lick us. In the park she’d eat other dog’s poop
(especially if it was still warm) but given the option she preferred Canada
goose or swan droppings and especially rabbit droppings. Until she discovered
deer droppings and horse manure.
This is another subject that books seem to shy away from but
I think that the dog’s natural inclination to eat faeces is one of the reasons
that our ancestors allowed them to hang around human settlements. They were the
local sanitation engineers, vacuuming up human waste that otherwise would have
accumulated in substantial quantities once people ceased to be nomadic and
settled in permanent communities. This is evident today, not just in Bean’s
inclination to eat faeces but in the role that dogs still play worldwide. (I
hate to admit it but my daughter Tamara’s Labrador Lola, has a preference for
dosser poo. During warm weather when men sleep overnight in the local parks,
they use certain trees as their latrine sites. We didn’t know this until Lola
explained that fact to us.)
Throughout the world there are two species that routinely
feed in our latrines, pigs and dogs. In some cultures, we dump our faeces
directly into pigstys but dogs are more inclined to search out our latrine
sites. Anthropologists mention this when they write about cultures in Asia,
Africa and South America although almost always in passing, as if it were a
natural assumption that this is what dogs always do. The parasitologist
Christopher Barnard says that amongst the livestock-raising Turkana people of
dry, arid north Kenya, mothers of newborn babies are issued with a puppy as a
substitute baby wipe. He says that dog faeces from their Basenji-like livestock
dogs, mixed with charcoal, is used by the Turkana to treat wounds while women
traditionally used dog faeces mixed with fat as a lubricant to prevent damage
caused to their skin by their heavy necklaces. Barnard was interested in the
Turkana’s interactions with dogs because these people have the world’s highest
incidence of hydatid disease, a serious tapeworm illness transmitted through
dog faeces. Raymond Coppinger says that in his studies of the dogs on Pemba, an
island off the coast of Tanzania inhabited by a Muslim culture, the feral dogs
– culturally disliked by the people – space themselves out in settlements
aligning themselves to specific locations where they eat scraps and raid
outdoor latrines.
Once our ancestors had settled in permanent habitations, and
stored food, as well as acting as natural toilet cleaners, dogs also controlled
local vermin such as mice and rats that were attracted to the food stores. It
wasn’t until centuries later, when the North African Wildcat evolved into the
domesticated cat, that the dog’s vermin-killing role came to be shared with our
other favourite domesticated carnivore