Hey, welcome to the short Stuff, Josh Chuck, Jerry Dave.
Let's get all right, this is our episode on dog poop.
That's right, you can't say poop.
Dog poop, white dog poop.
Specifically white dog poop, the same white dog poop that Sarah Silverman saying about, same white dog poop that shows up in Stepbrothers, which is probably the only reason why people who were born after the late eighties are aware that white dog poop pep even ever existed.
I don't know the Sarah Silverman bit. And I've seen Stepbrothers a bunch, and I don't remember the white dog poop in that one.
Those neighborhood bullies, the kids they make Will Ferrell touch his tongue to the white dog.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And you know what, until you said this, I didn't notice that. I don't notice white dog poop.
Oh really, I definitely did. It was a mainstay while we were growing up, Like it was a thing when you were walking down the sidewalk in your neighborhood and you just look to your left in somebody's yard, there were piles of white dog poop, and you do not see that these days.
I never thought about it until you sent this, And there is a reason why. And I thought the reason was going to be as simple as people pick up their dog poop more than they did in the eighties.
That is absolutely wrong.
Yeah, it's calcium, right.
Yeah, the diet of dogs changed dramatically in the late eighties early nineties, and the thing that was giving these dogs white dog poop, or making dogs poop white, was an overabundance of calcium that was in standard dog food at the time.
Yeah, dog food was pretty bad back then. There's still tons of bad dog food and pet food in general, but there's lots of really good stuff now. Back then it was very much loaded with bone meal and some meat. But basically it's that bone meal, lots of calcium and bones. And you know, calcium is good to dogs. You know, a little bit of calcium is fine, but if you
have too much of it, you can't absorb it. It comes out in your poop and it doesn't come out white, but it dries up in the sun, and once the water is removed, it turned that chalky white.
Yeah. I think ifl science compared it to when humans take like vitamins and we don't absorb all of it, it just comes out in our pea. Same thing with calcium and dog's diets, like after they have as much as they need, they just pass it in their poop. And then also one of the other problems with that dog food in the sixties, seventies and eighties is that the way that the bones were rendered made it even harder
to absorb, so a lot of that calcium. They might not have even been getting enough calcium from the food, they just weren't absorbing it. They were passing it. So if the poop wasn't coming out white, which I can attest. I had a dog in the eighties.
What was your dog's name?
Well, there were a few, but jingle Bells j was a great one. God JB was such a good dog. We brought her home and put her in the fence for the first time. I went to the shelter and brought her home and she just looked at us and jumped right over the fence, and we're like, oh, this one's gonna be trouble. She was, but she was a great dog. And then the other one was ll llban. Those are the two dogs I had in the eighties.
That's great, that's a very eighties dog name.
Yeah, she was so sweet. I'll just tell you one anecdote, real quick. Ell was a I guess kind of a Shepherd mix Doberman Shepherd mix, kind of super sweet, super sad eyes, just the sweetest dog. She just looked like she'd seen too much in life, even though I know for a fact she hadn't. She's had kind of the
old soul thing going on. And she was roommates with a dog named Hershey, little Schnauzer, and Hershey would fall into the pool every once in a while, and Ell, who was a great swimmer, would go in and swim over to her and push her nut sure towards the steps so they could both get out. I saw it more than once. That's how good a dog.
Al L was well very quickly. Then I, as a child had the big two were Huggy Bear and Bo. Huggy Bear was a German Shepherd that had floppy ears, and Bo was a Basset hound who would step on its ears they were so long. And we know I've talked about it before, but we kept our dogs outside. My parents did that. We had a big, probably quarter acre dog fenceton dog pen with a very large doghouse built on it. And when Huggy Bear died, Bo died not long after because of a broken heart, we think.
And one day my parents came home and found me laying in their doghouse.
Crying that sweet hew old were you, I.
Don't remember, probably like nine or ten.
Man, that is sweet Chuck would be a guest.
But anyway, you were talking before we digressed about your dogs in the eighties.
Oh yeah, so we both had dogs in the eighties, and we could attest that their poop didn't come out white. It magically became white as time war on.
That's right, And we could stop here with some heartwarming stories and the answer that question. But because we do what we do, we're gonna talk more about dog food and dog poop right after this, all right, we promised to talk more about dog food. It used to be not as good, like we said, full of bone meal
and stuff like that. But after World War Two there was a better economy and many more dogs became household pets and over time, and of course it's really exploded in the past like fifteen to twenty years, but even back then, people realize, manufacturers realized that there was a lot of money to be made in the pet industry, and dog foods started very slowly to become a little bit better and then got really really good in the past fifteen years.
Well, they got worse before they got better, for sure, because when they figured out that they could mass produce this stuff and sell it like gangbusters, they were like, well, what's the cheapest stuff we can put in here that won't actually kill the dogs most likely horse, So they started putting well, the horse was actually earlier in the
century before World War Two. And then everybody's like, this is just wrong somehow, we don't can't put our finger on it, but we are not going to feed our dog's horse meat anymore.
Yeah.
After World War Two, that's when they started extruding stuff which apparently extracts a lot of vitamins and nutrients from food. They started adding a lot of fillers that are super cheap, and the food we were feeding our dogs was just tear and they came loaded with calcium.
That's right. And like I said, food got better and better over the years, especially more recently, and these days there's a lot of debate on like what you should be feeding your pets. Everything kind of points to like real food. Like, if you're the best pet owner in the world, you're cooking your dog food and vegetables and stuff like that.
Right, Yeah, for sure, you Mey cooks that for all the time. You know, there's also some pretty good stuff you can order too. Yeah, oh yeah, but yeah, it's I think that's probably dogs have the healthiest diet as a group now in their entire history with humans.
Yeah. Absolutely, dogs love veggies. I feed my dog's table scrap veggies all the time, and all of my dogs even before this crew, have loved vegetables. But I think they just like any kind of human food. They rarely see them turn their little noses up at anything.
Yeah for sure, Like Mama will eat stuff I won't eat, like peas.
Oh I love peas.
So you said that dog food got better and better. The thing is is the reason why white dog poop suddenly disappeared is because it suddenly got better around the late eighties and nineties, Like people started being like, this is not stop selling us this stuff. It's not good for our dogs. And there was a quick change in the industry, and that led to lower amounts of calcium, which led to lower amounts of white white dog poop. Yeah, until it essentially just went away.
Yeah, they got more fiber in their diet now and just you know, more nutrient and vitamin rich dog food. I'm now noticing. I guess that I think about it, but I honestly never really thought about it until yesterday when I started reading up on this stuff that I guess you really don't see as much white dog poop anymore.
And there's also like it's still not done. Like we're dogs definitely eat better than ever, but we're still like, well, wait a minute, can they exist on a vegan diet? I don't know. Is dry dog food better than wet? Apparently wet dog food has eight times the greenhouse gas emissions of dry dog food, But if you ask the dog, they're like, no, we want we want wet. There's so the jury is still out, but it is clear that dog food is more is healthier than it ever has been in the history of dog food.
Yeah. We back when we had Lucy before she left us, she had autoimmune issues Lucy and Buckley did, and so grain free diet. That's when we started sort of going grain free back then, and we kind of kept on that train through this new batch.
Yeah, I've seen grain can be kind of hard on dogs sometimes. Yeah, it's not uncommon from what I saw too. And then fats too, depending on the kind of fat, it can lead to pancreatitis pretty quickly in dogs or even gastritis. And you don't want either of those because once they start, they can become chronic and that's sad for the dog because they have to eat the most boring blane diet imaginable.
Should we finish up on what dog poop should look like, let's and now, if your dog is healthy, generally looks like because of the lack of calcium.
Yeah. If you see white poop now and it's speckled white, that's probably worms and you want to do something about that.
Yeah. And if you see the old school white poop, that means you know, someone's living seventy style, so it's got a big stash of I'm not going to name check any brands, but you know, what we fed people in the eighties are what we fed dogs in the eighties.
They also raw diets often contain ground up bones, and that can cause the old school white dog poop too.
Yeah, So normal dog poop is a tube of poop. It should be firm and it should be like a light like chocolatey brown.
Yeah, that's thanks to our friends at All Dogs Poop, the dog waste cleaning service.
Which is amazing. What should it not look like?
Well, if it's orange, it means that your dog is not digesting it slowly enough. It's just kind of passing through largely undigested or too undigested, and it'll come out orange, and you want to look into that.
What if it's yellow.
If it's yellow, that means it probably has some mucus in it, which means that your dog is not tolerating its food very well. Usually the reason why is because you just switched their diet radically and all of a sudden.
All right, If it's green, you know what that means? That means your dog's out there eating grass, probably because it has a little tum tum problem. I think that's usually when dogs mouond weeds and grass. But that can come out in the poop as grass.
What about don't.
Doesn't change much? Gray is no good? That means you're you got too much fat in the diet.
Yeah, and again that can lead to pancreatitis.
And finally, red.
Yeah, especially if there's red, that means your dog has blood in its stool, which means you should pick them up and take them to the vet. Right, then that's right. But also don't discount black tari stool. A lot of people don't realize that that means there's blood. They're bleeding
internally as well. It's just higher up in the digestive tract, so it gets incorporated in the poop earlier and more completely than something like the blood that's red streaky, that means it's happening in the lower digestive tract.
Yeah. I've been a wash in dog poop lately because very sadly, our fourteen year old Charlie is becoming a little bit incontinent. And she's doing great, but she's got very stiff little peg leg back legs, and she's starting to just poop when the poop is there, instead of saying like I can make it to the door and asks to be let out. Yeah, it's no fun. But you don't put a dog down because you don't like cleaning up their poop.
No, you just yell at them.
So you just we're cleaning up a lot of dog beep lately.
Did you say dog beep? Yeah, I'm sorry about that.
That's all right. It's no fun, but especially when you wake up in the middle of the night and it's like that's the smell wakes you up. Yeah, that's and it's just it's aging is no fun, aging animals, it's no fun. But we're in the middle of it. What are you gonna do?
Just yell at the dog.
No, stop saying that.
We want to thank our friends at IFL Science Mental Flaws, All Dogs Poop and K s n F out of Joplin, Missouri, Oh for the info for this one.
You're listening to K s n F Oh dog poop talk all the time.
That's right, and that means short stuff is up.
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.