Hi All,

My 4 month old pup, Jerry is a repeat offender in the "personal snacking" (as I call it) department.  He eats his own poop.  Not all the time, not anyone else's poop, but he does do it often.

I can see a method to this madness.  He only eats it when he goes in his crate or in his x-pen (or I suppose he'd do it if he was loose in the house and had an accident).  I'm assuming he's trying to clean his space and I get it...but UGH. No!

I'm not really sure what I can do about it at this point, as we're still working on potty training.  I praise the heck out of him when he goes outside and also when he "leaves it" and walks away when he's done.  I've read articles that say putting things on their food like meat tenderizer makes it smell differently and they won't eat it, but that just sounds strange.  I've also heard that pumpkin helps, but he eats a bit of pumpkin almost every morning in his kong and I've seen no improvement.

I suppose an issue could be that he's having accidents to begin with.  I don't really know what to say to that. He has a pretty regular poop schedule, or at least I make sure he does to try and avoid this problem.  Sometimes he gets distracted when he's going and doesn't drop it all.  Then when he's antsy or bored in his crate (mostly on car rides or at night) he'll drop the rest.  When I'm driving on the freeway, I can't really stop the car and take him out and correct the behavior and when we're gone and he does it, we don't see evidence until we come back. (I was on the phone in the car the other day when it happened.  Had to explain why I was saying, "No Jerry! No!" Gross, lol)

I'm not really worried about the nutrition factor, I'm mostly just trying to figure out what actions I can take to improve the behavior.  Does anyone else have this problem?  I'd appreciate your feedback if you've dealt with it before.  Maybe he'll grow out of it, but he's 4 months now and moving quickly into adolescence. (Oh the puppy attitude...)  Thanks for your help!