Why your dog eats poop, and how to stop it
We see it in a lot of the yards we work. Here is what actually causes it, what the internet gets wrong, and the one intervention that works every time.
Dogs eating their own poop has a proper name, coprophagia, and an improper one that most of our customers use when they call about it. It is common enough that we see evidence of it in yards every week, and it is one of the few dog problems where the people who clean yards for a living have a clearer view than almost anyone.
What causes it
The honest answer is that nobody is certain, and the explanations fall into a few groups.
Puppies do it because puppies put everything in their mouths. Most grow out of it somewhere in the first year without any intervention at all.
Some adult dogs do it out of boredom, particularly dogs left alone in a yard for long stretches with nothing else going on. Some do it because they were punished for having an accident indoors and learned that the evidence is the problem. Some appear to do it because another dog in the house does, which is as close to a social explanation as this gets.
There is also a nutritional theory, that a dog is missing something in its diet and is trying to recover it. It gets repeated a great deal online. It is worth asking your vet about, because an underlying absorption problem is a real thing and a vet can test for it, but it does not explain most of the cases we see. Plenty of well-fed dogs on good food do this.
Why the remedies mostly do not work
Walk into any pet store and you will find additives that are supposed to make a dog’s own waste taste bad to it. They work for some dogs and not for others, and the obvious problem is that they do nothing about the other dog in the household, or the neighbor’s dog, or the rabbit.
Deterrent sprays have the same issue. You have to find the thing before the dog does in order to spray it, and if you have found it first you have already solved the problem by picking it up.
Training a reliable “leave it” is genuinely useful and worth doing. It also requires you to be standing there.
The one thing that works
Remove the opportunity. A dog cannot eat what is not in the yard.
This is unsatisfying advice because it sounds like no advice at all, and it is also the only intervention with a success rate near a hundred percent. Every other approach tries to change the dog’s mind. This one changes the yard.
What that means in practice depends on your situation. If you have one dog and you are home, it means going out with them and picking up immediately, every time. If you have two or three dogs and a job, it means the yard gets cleared on a schedule, by you or by somebody else.
The households where this problem persists are almost always the ones where waste sits in the yard for days. The dog has unsupervised access to it, and a habit forms. Clear the yard consistently for a few weeks and the behavior usually fades, because the behavior needs material to continue.
When to involve a vet
Call your vet if the behavior starts suddenly in an adult dog that never did it before, if it comes with weight loss, appetite changes or diarrhea, or if your dog is eating other things it should not. A sudden change in an established pattern is worth a conversation with someone qualified to investigate it, and we are not.
What we see
We work a lot of yards in St. Louis and St. Charles, and the pattern is consistent. Weekly customers do not call us about this. The people who call are the ones whose yards had not been cleared in a while before they signed up, and the calls stop a few weeks in.
That is not a claim that we cure anything. It is an observation that the problem needs a supply, and the supply is the part you can control.
