By Mark Salamon, April 1, 2019
Animals in the wild are fascinating to watch because even without using things like diet tracking apps, they instinctively know what they should eat to maximize their chance of survival. Even domesticated dogs have not lost this ability, as can be seen when they escape to the natural environment of their owners backyards and immediately look for another animal’s poop to eat.
This is a real life example of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which states that different species evolve by doing moronic things that come naturally, and then somehow survive anyway. This theory has successfully explained many phenomena that occur in the natural world, like the Atkins diet and liposuction. Wait, I take that back, Dr. Atkins didn’t actually survive his own diet. But he’s the exception that proves the rule.
And now another exception has come to light according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that taking pills made of other people’s poop is an effective way to treat the severe bacterial infection known as C. diff, or Clostridium difficile, which causes inflammation of the colon and severe diarrhea. (1) Apparently, people who have this condition don’t have enough “good bacteria” in their own poop to fight it off, so eating other people’s poop helps. This throws a big wrench in Darwin’s theory, because it shows that dogs are eating other animal’s poop because it’s actually good for them. But all is not lost because it still doesn’t explain why dogs also love to eat tissues, undergarments, and power tools.
By the way, the old way of treating this condition, before we came up with eating poop, was to shove someone else’s poop up the patient’s ass. This procedure is known as Fecal Microbiota Transplantation, or FMT. This term comes from the scientific property that it sounds better than “shoving someone else’s poop up your ass.”
Surprisingly, domesticated dogs have not yet been observed shoving poop up each other’s asses. But from all the sniffing going on, I am pretty sure they are thinking about it.
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