Why are dog poops no longer white?
This is a really simple question to answer. Dog food has come along dramatically since the 70s to the point where the ingredients are unrecognisable. No doubt you can get the old recipes full of crushed bones on some backwater market somewhere but for the vast majority, it’s now a much more balanced diet with a lot more fibre packed in.
This creates a healthy dog with healthy stools which will eventually decompose completely – exactly the way it should be.
Read More: Yellow Dog Poo After Chicken and Rice
I couldnt find an in-depth article as to what caused the demise of chalky canine chunks, but theres this, from the not so scientific IFL Science:
If you were around in the 1970s or 1980s, you most likely remember white dog poop — it was so commonplace, nobody even questioned it. At least not that I can remember from my childhood. There was the brown variety and the white variety of doggy doo-doo, end of story. But now that the milky muck is no longer around, it seems awfully strange that white poop ever existed. In fact, Id forgotten all about it until I ran across an article this morning by the Animal Rescue Site, which pointed to dog food ingredients that were popular at the time as the culprit:
If you’re a dog owner, or even if you’re not, you could probably identify a pile of dog poo. It’s generally brown and sprinkled throughout yards, parks, and the occasional sidewalk.
As the sun dried the feces out, the white calcium would become visible – which is why dog poop was often viewed as white.
If you were around back when it was a regular sight, you may be wondering what happened to it. Did dog owners just get better at cleaning up their pets’ poo? Did dogs somehow evolve to poop darker?
The mystery was so popular that Sarah Silverman even wrote a song about it with lyrics that said: “What ever happened to that white dog poop from the 70’s? It went away as mysteriously as it came.”
However, dog poop wasn’t always the signature brown color it is today. In fact, back in the 1970s and 1980s, it was common to see chalky, white dog poop littering yards and sidewalks.