Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: White Dog Poop

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

If you grew up from the 70s to the 90s you know white dog poop. It’s the old, crusty – yes, white – phase that dog poop goes through as it ages on a lawn. Or it used to. Where has all the white poop gone?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Josh, Chuck, Jerry, Dave, let's go. 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. 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 step brothers, which is probably the only reason why people who were born after the late 80s are aware that white dog poop 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 Farrell touches tongue to the white dog poop. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know what until you sent 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 looked to your left and 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 gonna be

As simple as people pick up their dog poop more than they did in the 80s. That is absolutely wrong Yeah, it's calcium, right? Yeah, the the diet of dogs changed dramatically in the late 80s early 90s 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, it 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 Uh And some meat, but basically, it's that

bone meal. Lots of calcium and bones, and calcium is good to dogs, 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 waters are removed, it turns that 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 vitamins,

and we don't absorb all of it, it just comes out in our pee. Same thing with calcium and dogs 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 the dog food in the 60, 70s and 80s 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 80s. What was your dog's name? Well, there were a few, but Jingle Bells JB was a great one.

JB was such a good dog. We brought her home and put her in the fence for the first time. We 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 going one's gonna be trouble She was but she was a great dog and then the other one was LL LL being those are the two dogs ahead in the 80s That's great. That's a very 80s dog name LL bean. Yeah, she was so sweet. She said I'll just tell you one anecdote real quick LL was a I guess kind of a shepherd mix 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, Lil Schnouzer, and Hershey would fall into the pool every once in a while, and LL who was a great swimmer would go in and swim over to Hershey and push her, nutured toward the steps so they could both get out. I saw it more than once. That's how good a dog LL was. Well, very quickly then. As a child, the big two were Huggie Bear and Bo.

Nice. Huggie Bear was a German Shepherd that had floppy ears, and Bo was a bass at Hound, who would step on its ears. They were so long. And we talked about it before, but we kept our dogs outside. My parents did that. We had a big probably quarter acre, dog, fenced in dog pin with a very large doghouse built on it. And when Huggy Bear died, bow 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's sweet hell over you. I don't remember probably like nine or ten. Man, that is sweet chuck. That's sweet hell over you. I don't remember, probably like 9 or 10. Man, that is sweet, Chuck. It would be a guess. But anyway, you were talking before we digressed about your dogs in the 80s. Oh yeah, so we both had dogs in the 80s and we could attest that they're pooped and come out white. It magically became white as time wore on. That's right.

And we could stop here with some heartwarming stories and the answer to that question. But because we do what we do, we're going to talk more about dog food and dog boop right after this. A brand new historical true crime podcast. The year is 1800, a city hall, New York. The first murder trial in the American Judicial System. A man-sense trial for the charge of murder. Even with defense lawyers, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr on the case, this is probably the most famous trial you've never heard of.

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with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney. We talked through more than 150 tracks from McCartney's songbook, and while we did, we recorded our conversations. I mean the fact that I dreamed the song yesterday leads me to believe that it's not just quite as cut and dried as we think it is. And now you can listen to our conversations in our new podcast, McCartney, a life in lyrics. It was like going back to an old snapshot album, looking back on work, I hadn't thought much about for quite a few years.

Listen to McCartney and Life in lyrics on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 II, 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 15 to 20 years. But even back then, people realized, 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 15 years.

Well, they got worse before they got better for sure, because when they figured out that they could mass produce the 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? can put in here that won't actually kill the dogs most likely. So they started putting, well, the horse was actually earlier in the century before World War II. And then everybody was like, this is just wrong. Somehow we don't, you can't put our finger on it, but we are not going to feed our dogs horse meat anymore. After World War II, 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 terrible 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 what you should be feeding your pets. Everything kind of points to real food. 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. Yumi cooks that for Mo all the time. There's also some pretty good stuff you can order too.

Yeah, oh yeah. But yeah, I think that probably dogs have the healthiest diet as a group now in their entire history with humans. Yeah, absolutely. Dogs love veggies. I feed my dogs, table scrap veggies all the time. And all of my dogs, even before this crew, have love 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. Yeah, I'll love peas. So you said that dogs who 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 80s and 90s. 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 like lower amounts of white dog poop. Yeah. Until they 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, where dogs definitely eat better than ever, but we're still like, well, wait a minute, can they exist on a vegan diet?

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 what? There's so the jury's 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 a few back when we had Lucy before she left us,

she had autoimmune issues. Lucy Ambukhli did it. 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 green can be kind of hard on dogs sometimes. For it. 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, blame, diet, imaginable. Should we finish up on what dog poop should look like?

Let's. And now, if your dog is healthy, it 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 someone's living 70 style.

So it's got a big stash of, well, I'm not going to name check any brands, but, you know, what we've had people in the 80s or what we've had dogs in the 80s. 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 two undigested, and it'll come out orange and you wanna look into that. What if it's yellow? If it's yellow, that means it probably has some mucous in it, which means that your dog is not tolerating its food very well.

Usually the reason why is because you just switch their diet radically in all of a sudden. All right, if it's green, you know what that means? That means your dogs out there eating grass, probably because it has a little tum-tum problem. I think that's usually in dogs, mow and weeds and grass, but that can come out in the poop as grass. What about gray? 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 streaks, 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 tary 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 and dog poop lately because very sadly our 14 year old Charlie is becoming a little bit incontinent. Aw. 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 ask to be let out. Uh-huh. We're charting. 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, uh, we're cleaning up a lot of dog beep. Like, 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 not good. And it's just it's it's aging as no fun, aging animals are 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 Floss, All Dogs, Poop, and KSNF out

of Joplin, Missouri. Ooh, for the info for this one. You're listening to KSNF. All dog poop talk all the time. That's right, and that means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are where every listen to your favorite shows.