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E-mail received at dog fun on 29/08/00.

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Dear, Sir.
I really so glad to find your page. Its a great job of you, Sir. Thanks a lot to help me training my dog with your professional advise. My dog, a Doberman dog of 8 month old, like to eat its own faeces, Sir. We have tried hard to change this hobby of it, but we always failed. If we watch it, it won't eat it, but if we aren't there, it will lap all of it. I don't think its normal for a Doberman to do that, so Sir, please help us to train our dog. We all love it so much, and we really upset about this. I myself almost frustated in training it about this problem. We always bit it if we know it ate its own faeces, but we failed to train it by this way. So Sir, we really need your advise and I'm looking forward to hear from you soon. Thanks for your attention for me, Sir.
Thank you very much.

Your admirer, Y Tachibana

Jade's reply.

Thank you for you E-mail. The first point that I would make is that your Doberman is not strange and its behaviour is by no means uncommon. Your Doberman is basically scavenging and this is a natural action for a dog. The fact that to us its choice of food seems extremely unpleasant does not mean that to the dog it is unpleasant.

The second point that I would make is that you should not give up on your dog. No matter how unpleasant the situation is at the moment you will be able to work things out given time. At 8 months old Doberman's are a lot of hard work in every respect (BUT THIS WILL SOON PASS). They are constantly learning how they should and how they should not behave, what actions bring them rewards and what actions do not.

The condition to which you refer is coprophagia or eating faeces this can occur for a number of reasons. It might be as simple as a basic need to experience scavenging which can be corrected by making meals more exiting. Teach your dog that the food that you can offer is more interesting than the faeces. Hide food in the garden, follow your dog, and tell it to leave when it goes near faeces (perhaps make it sit) then reward your dog with a treat if it is good. Do not react if it is bad, as it will not learn to change its ways over night. You must also consider that your reaction could be a reward in it's self to your dog. I am referring to attention seeking, even by hitting a dog, or shouting at it, you are giving it attention and if this is why the dog is eating faeces when you shout or hit you are actually encouraging the dog to do this again. My main advice would be to be patient and to stay calm, you will solve this but I would suggest that rewarding good behaviour is far more successful than punishing bad behaviour.

Take a look at these web pages on the subject I hope that they are of help to you.
http://www.vetmed.wsu.edu/pets/study.htm http://www.erinet.com/ghost/coprophagia.htm http://canines.com/library/coprophagia.shtml http://www.goldenretriever.com/coprophagia.html
Good luck to both you and your dog, all the best,

Jade the Doberman

As with the rest of Dog Fun we are only offering advice, we have learned a lot through our own experience and would like to further that knowledge with your help. If you have any good tips or advice that would help dog owners drop us a line to jade@dogfun.co.uk and we will display your advice and give you credit for your help!