We love our kids unconditionally. We would love to love our dogs condition-free, except for one nagging issue, the poop thing. “Why does he eat it? How do I get her to stop?” It’s so gross that it’s tough to watch, tough to stomach, and tough to get over when we look at our beloved pets. The answers are so wide-ranging that it’s safe to say no expert has a definitive answer for why they do it, nor is there a definitive answer to how we can stop it. The best answer I’ve heard is that their wild ancestors ate their puppy’s poo to prevent predators from knowing where they were. It’s an answer, but no one is saying it is the answer.
Even if we had one definitive answer everyone agreed on, and we knew how to train them to stop doing it, it wouldn’t change the fact that it’s just gross. Long-time dog handlers, who have had their boundaries tested numerous times, say that poop-eating still grosses them out.
The dog is attracted to the most disgusting matter. If they spot a hard, mostly white and crumbly piece of excrement in the grass, they might give it a whiff and move on, but a fresh steaming pile flips an ignition switch in the need-to-know aisle of their brain. Their desire to learn every little nugget of information possible about that turd can require a muscular tug on the leash to get them away from it. Depending on the size of our dog, it might alter our preferred ninety-degree angle with the earth when they find a rotting, maggot infested opossum corpse nearby. Our beloved little beasts can’t help it, it’s the way they were wired, but our hard wiring leads us to find the act of sniffing, sometimes licking, and even eating excrement so repulsive that it can temporarily alter our perception of them.
Most of us won’t sniff, lick, or eat the steaming carcass of the victim of a car accident we see in the other lane of the interstate, but we will slow our roll to see everything we can. Coming to a complete stop is beyond the pale for most of us, but how slow do we roll by, hoping to catch a little glimpse of something awful?
To curb our enthusiasm, first responders assign some of their personnel to traffic control. They do this to prevent oblivious drivers from hitting the personnel on the scene, but they also know that our desire to see something awful will cause traffic jams and accidents.
“I could put together a book of some of the dumbest things I’ve seen drivers do,” a friend of mine, often assigned to traffic control, said. “I’m not talking about a top ten list either. I’m talking about a multi-layered, illustrative, instructional, and sad-but-true list.”
I realize that 20-30 minutes is a relatively minor traffic jam, compared to most cities, but the reason some of us live in big towns and small cities is to avoid the perils of over population. So, when we finally involuntarily creep up on the accident, and we see no other obstructions in our lane, or the other three to our right, it is frustrating.
We get so frustrated with all the drivers driving so slow that it’s obvious that they hope we misconstrue their slow roll with a respectfully cautious approach to an accident. They just want to see something, and they hope they time it just right to see the first responders pull the bloody and screaming from the wreckage.
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