Our pets can sometimes have habits that gross us out, but when your dog or cat eats their own poop, you may feel completely disgusted. Coprophagia, the technical term for stool eating, has different causes. Dogs commonly express this behavior more than cats, and some dogs are even attracted to other animal feces and litter boxes for cat stools.
Coprophagia can be behavioral. Both dogs and cats may pick up the habit as adults or at a young age. Some animals are driven by boredom or curiosity, by anxiety or confinement issues, or to seek attention. You can help correct the behavior by training and denying your dog access to feces. Supervise your dog while outdoors and keep the area clean from any stools. Keep cat litter boxes in a location where your dog cannot access them. Coprophagia can also be a sign of an underlying medical condition or nutritional deficiency. Certain medical conditions and drugs can increase appetite and stool eating. Some of these include intestinal parasite infections, diabetes, Cushing’s disease, and thyroid disease. Dogs that have poorly balanced diets, malabsorption problems, or lack digestive enzymes may also begin to eat their stools in an attempt to replace missing nutrients.
Coprophagia Stool Eating Deterrents for Dogs and Cats
VetRxDirect has a variety of dietary and nutritional supplements to help curb stool eating. These deterrents make the taste and odor of their feces less appealing and help replenish vitamins, enzymes, and nutrients caused by deficiency.
For-Bid is a product used for dogs and cats with coprophagia. For-Bid is a powder that you sprinkle over your pet’s food. After ingesting, the ingredients will give the stools an unpalatable taste and curb the undesirable habit.
Stop Stool Eating discourages dogs from consuming their own feces as well as other dogs’. It helps support digestive health with a live source of prebiotics and probiotics, as well as digestive enzymes protease, cellulase, lipase, alpha, and amylase. Together these ingredients work to make eating stools less desirable to your dog.
Cease Coprophagia discourages stool eating by making the feces have a bad taste with the ingredient MSG. It includes B complex vitamins, which are a potential cause of coprophagia pets that are deficient. It also helps in the breakdown of fiber by using the digestive enzyme cellulase.
CoproBan deters dogs and cats from the bad habit of stool eating by making animal feces taste and texture unpleasant with MSG and digestive enzyme cellulase. It can be given to dogs to deter them from consuming their own or to cats to prevent dogs from raiding litter boxes.
Do you have a dog or cat that eats stool? Have you used a supplement or deterrent to curb their habit?
This information is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease and is purely educational. Please seek advice from your pet’s veterinarian with any questions regarding your pet’s health.