on poop

If words like 'poop', or discussions of body functions, make you anxious, then WARNING! WARNING! You may not wish to read any further.

But if you're feeling curious, please feel free to read on.

As far as I know, everybody poops. People, cats, dogs, anteaters, frogs, deer, and cute little bunnies. You take food in, your body digests it. Digestion permits the distribution of fuel and nutrients to the body. What's left over comes out the other end. The roughage etc (that helped everything pass through yards of intestine) is no longer needed. Those remnants pass through. The excreted substances and bacteria replenish the soil to help grow more food.

Poop (also known as shit, crap, BM [bowel movement]) is used by nature in other ways. For example, some insects house their eggs in animal poop. This provides insulation from the harsh weather, and protection from being eaten by other creatures. (One of my favorite most fascinating insects is the dung beetle [dung being another poop synonym].)

Some thirty years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the employee library at Crater Lake National Park. The library had a number of reference books so that rangers (who were like apprentice naturalists, learning from the more experienced rangers) could study up and identify the different trees, wildflowers, birds, butterflies, and mammals that were part of the park.

The only book that remains in my memory, though, was an old reference book (1930s?) on animal footprints and scat ('scat' being another synonym for poop). The book listed the many mammals that lived in the park - grizzlies and black bears, foxes, marmots, chipmunks, golden mantled ground squirrels, porcupines, etc, etc. For each mammal, there was a brief description and two photos: fox footprints here, fox scat there. (Scat for every animal looks different because different animals eat different foods, and because the body aperture for the release of the scat varies in size and design for different species. Rabbit poop looks like little grassy pellets. Bear poop comes in large pie-shaped plops.)

The book was fascinating and very very useful because when walking on the park trails, you could tell what creatures were currently in the same area with you, and how recently they had come through. It's interesting to know which animals inhabit the different habitats in the park, and its important to know if you're thinking of picnicking in a favorite grizzly bear hangout. The scat on the trail is like a calling card from the grizzly: 'yep, we're here too, so mind your manners.' It's good to know the difference between the calling card of a raccoon, and that of a bobcat.

As a kid, I grew up in a rural area in south central Louisiana, and we always had a few goats or chickens, or a pony. City people would pay us a call sometimes in spring, offering to shovel out the barn and carry off the animal manure (another synonym for poop) to fertilize their vegetable and flower gardens. When I lived in Austin, Texas - a popular gardening product was bagged Mexican Free-Tailed Bat guano or droppings (two more synonyms!) which was collected locally and considered an especially valuable garden enhancer. (I wonder if someday they'll be selling bags of dog poop - would that be a fertilizer equal to that produced by chickens and cows?)

We're taught to fear poop in western cultures because, depending on what you like to eat (meat diet producing more stink than vegetable diets), the smell can be unpleasant, and there are concerns about bacteria that cause diseases. It's helpful to realize that except for humans who leave their droppings in sanitized porcelain plumbing, the excretions of the other creatures in the wild are deposited directly back to the earth where it is promptly recycled by numberless plants, insects, and wildlife. So, yes, I'm glad we wash our hands, but we can relax a bit, too. This is something we all have in common, and it is an integral part of the cycle of life on our dear planet earth.