How to Make Puppy Poop Taste Bad
Wait – doesn’t puppy poop already taste terrible? You’d think so. But here’s an alternate take:
Let’s say that you’re a puppy and your only source of food, for your first twelve weeks, is your mom’s milk. Now, realize that your 5 siblings are in the same situation. And your mom is underweight, and underfed. You’d probably be very interested in eating anything you can find. If all there is, is poop, then poop is what you eat. With gusto.
This is the setting that Remo and Ruthie were born into. Hungry, covered in fleas, living outdoors in somebody’s yard for a minute, til their first humans at least had the decency to surrender them to their local animal shelter in an upstate New York town.
A normal healthy puppy gets milk from their normal healthy mom for the first 6 to 8 weeks of life. Then they get solid food, meant for puppies, with extra protein, fat and calories to help them grow. But that’s not how it went down for Remo and Ruthie.
So having formed the habit of competing for any poop pile they can find, they were not going to give that habit up easily.
“Well, once they’ve eaten a real meal, and they’re full, surely…” I thought.
“Once they realize that they are getting regular meals, three or four times a day, they wouldn’t… would they?”
Waiting for them to see the light, stuffing their guts with great food did nothing to change their behavior. I was picking up their poop as soon as I sensed it had hit the floor. I started to rack my brain about how to get the poop-eating to stop. Had I read something somewhere about adding hot pepper to the poop, and let them eat it? Wait – was that for some other animal? Is hot pepper toxic for puppies? Augh!
I turned to our foster group leader. “I’m having this problem…” I said to her as I was picking up the de-worming medicine from her. I explained that the puppies aggressively compete to own each poop, no matter who deals it.
“That’s because they’re still used to being starving,” she said. “Try putting some pumpkin puree in their food. Just plain, from a can. Either that, or try some pineapple. Just a small spoonful, mix it in. It tastes good going in, but it makes their poop taste terrible when it comes out. That should do the trick.”
That night, I put some pumpkin in their dinner. It was a BIG hit. At one point, Remo was hogging all the food, and growling at Ruthie for trying to get her share. He was eating maniacally. I picked him up to force him to take a break. There he was with bright orange pumpkin smudges all over his chin. He looked up at me, blinking, and let out a big burp. “NOW you feel better,” I told him. He squirmed as I put him back down, and ended up smearing what was left of his pumpkin-chin on my shirt sleeve. A nice long mushy stripe up to my elbow. I sighed. ‘This kid’s going to go far,’ I thought. ‘With that kind of charm…’
Late the following day, I noticed that they weren’t devouring the poop; just tasting it, then leaving it. I still tried to be quick at picking it up off the floor. Because, yuck. By the time we got through 2 full cans of pumpkin (several days of meals), only Ruthie was still trying to eat poop. And less enthusiastically, at that.
When I ran out of pumpkin, we switched to crushed pineapple. I had never known that pineapple was ok for dogs to eat. I would have thought it too acidic, like citrus. They hate citrus. The first trial with pineapple went slowly. It was mixed into their food, and it took them almost twice as long as usual to eat it. ‘Well forget that, ‘ I thought. ‘I need them to eat.’ I thought pineapple was a fail. But then I decided to try again, and just give it to them straight, as dessert. That worked! They gobbled it up. And boy, the next day’s poop was noticeably stinkier. And they didn’t eat it. Not any of it. Ta-daa!
Puppies are Jerks 