COPROPHAGIA - Better known as poop eating.  As I read yet another thread this morning about poop eating, I got to thinking about a few facts.  Dogs are carnivores, right?  Dogs and wolves in the wild do not eat vegetable matter (unless it's in the stomach of their prey).   They don't eat carrots, they don't eat peas, green beans or  leafy plants........just meat, game and fowl.  It is well-documented that they actually lack the enzymes to fully break down the fiber in these items.  Raw Diet literature tells us if you're going to feed these things to dogs, they will be processed better if chopped, ground or cooked, which helps to break the fiber down for them.  If raw or left whole, it pretty much passses out in the feces unaltered.  If you doubt this, just feed some frozen peas or diced carrots to your dog and you'll see it comes out pretty much "whole" the way it went in.    I HAVE observed this over the years with many of my dogs so I KNOW that to be the case.

Ok, that said............Fiber pretty much passes out "undigested" (be it whole veggies or fiber/filler laden kibble) and causes very large poops.  Seems to me dogs would perceive the unprocessed vegetable matter as "food" that was "leftover" and to be eaten (once again).  Makes sense to me. 

Button and Zipper have NEVER eaten poop, not even when they were on Diamond Lamb & Rice kibble.  But that may just be because I have always done "Poopie Patrol" & picked it all up weekly so it's just not there for them to think about eating it.  I read one time poop eating can be caused by boredom and availability.  Who knows?!? 

I thought, when I put Button & Zipper on the Raw Diet (all meat and internal organs), their poop might be somewhat "more seductive" and that they might begin this very unpleasant habit.  Didn't happen!  But literature on the raw diet says that virtually 100% (even most of the bone) of what they eat on a raw diet is fully digested.  That's why their poops are less frequent and much smaller in size now on the raw diet.  My girls USED to poop 3 times a day on kibble.  Now they only poop 1-2 times a day.  The poops are VERY small and always firm!  They may go smell it when one of them poops, but then they just walk away and go about their business (no pun intended). 

What do ya'll think about my theory?  If undigested fiber is a culprit and dogs have been eating kibble prretty much since the 50's, this just might be a major contributing factor in the "rampant" Coprophagia we are seeing in so many of today's dogs.