The Scoop on Poop
By Cindy Blobaum

You are on your daily poop patrol when suddenly you spot it. Strange scat - in your backyard! After picking up after your pooch every day, you recognize puppy piles in an instant. But these dropping are different. You look closer, trying to figure out what dared to dump its doo-doo in your yard.

When you take a closer peep at the poop, you are doing what humans have done for thousands of years. It may seem hard to believe, but scatology (the study of animal excrement) has helped make our lives easier. For example, when people hunted for their meat instead of picking it up at a store, trackers who were good at reading the secrets of scat - which animal made it, how long ago, the direction the animal was moving - helped hunters find their food quicker.

Searching for Scat

Fewer people hunt today, but those that do often pay big bucks for skilled guides to help them in the same ways. Backcountry rangers, wildlife biologists and zoologists also hunt for scat to help them locate, identify and evaluate the health of hard-to-find animals like mountain lions and wolverines. Even dinosaur hunters have started looking for petrified poop, called coprolites. Fresh or fossilized, feces from wild and domestic animals can be looked at in a lab to determine what an animal has been eating, whether it has any internal parasites and other information.

Feces as fertilizer

Hunters and scientists are not the only ones who treasure scat. Perhaps it was a farmer long ago who spied a seedling sprouting in a stool - and then watched it grow bigger, healthier and faster than the seeds he planted. However it happened, humans learned feces is good fertilizer. Cow, horse, sheep and pig manure is often spread on farm fields, returning important nutrients to the soil. Even elephant piles in zoos are sometimes picked up, processed and then sold as premium fertilizer for flower gardens.

Of course, not all scat is created equal. The circular pellets and piles from plant eating animals (herbivores) are full of undigested plant materials. These make better manure than the stringier, smellier stools of meat eaters (carnivores) that are full of hair and bone chips.

This recycling of refuse is nothing new. If left alone, the dung that you discovered would provide a feast for worms, flies, beetles and other animals. After these small creatures digested their dinners, their bodies would secrete scat so small that you would probably never notice it.

Away with waste

Sure, animal droppings can be good for the soil. But if you’re not planting a garden, there are also good reasons to pick up after your pet.

For one thing, if everyone left poop around, there would be a huge increase in the number of insects. And some bugs will land on your lunch just after they’ve deserted a pile of dung. Sound disgusting? It’s also dangerous to your health, since many insects carry diseases.

So get up, grab your pooper scooper, and say “Scat!” to animal waste!

Scat Snack