December 2020
Recently, while waiting for the practice microwave to warm up my lunch, I stumbled across a link to an article about human poo being central to the evolution of the dog. This might put ‘normal’ people off their lunch, but vets are made of sterner stuff!
It isn’t a new concept to me, as I first came across the theory that dogs evolved as poo-eating scavengers back when I started on my behaviour diploma. Many writers have preferred to talk about early dogs eating the rats and mice that were attracted to human dumps, but recent research on dogs and wolves in Ethiopia suggests that it may have been more about the human ‘dumps’. After all, early man would have found uses for most of the food he hunted and foraged, and little would have been thrown away as waste. The Ethiopian dogs had human poo as their second favourite meal (21 per cent of meals), and other free-living dogs, such as dingoes, like human poo too. Analysis showed the poo to be highly nutritious, almost as good as meat!