Fact or Fiction Quiz
- Foals are more likely to learn about food selection if they eat their mother’s feces.
- Coprophagy may serve to “immunize” the newborn against parasites.
- The mare's feces contain a pheromone that encourages foal to eat feces.
- Coprophagy may serve to strengthen the social bond of mother and foal.
- Coprophagy in adult horses means that something is lacking in their diet.
- Horses that eat feces receive many vitamins & minerals that may be lacking in the diet.
- Feces from animals that eat plants for food contain many of the B vitamins.
- Coprophagy will populate the foal’s gut with “good” bacteria.
- Show horses on limited feed intake and have an infrequent exercise program appear to be more prone to coprophagy.
- Coprophagy is normal but if practice frequently, then the horse's diet should be evaluated for deficiencies in protein, fiber and other nutrients.
- Adult horses in a research environment have eaten feces when dietary protein is deficient, but stopped when a protein supplement was fed and the deficiency corrected.
Ingestion of fecal material frequently raises concerns with horse owners. Coprophagy is a natural exploration by all equids and the primary benefit is inoculating the gut with bacteria that are necessary for hindgut digestion in the herbivore gut. The habit or practice is more likely behavioral and probably in domestic management is accentuated through boredom. There are biological mechanisms with all animals that tell us when we are hungry, thirsty, or a desire for a “taste for salt”. However a horse cannot process the thought, …oh, I need a little more iron, or riboflavin, or copper and thus randomly start to seek out a food source that hopefully supplies that nutrient(s). For all practical purposes coprophagy has absolutely nothing to do with nutrition unless the horse is unhealthy and in very poor condition. During my early training in animal nutrition, I recall a professor rationalizing that since microorganisms produce B-vitamins and vitamin K in the gut, coprophagy is a method of retrieving those nutrients so that they will enter the small intestine for processing and absorption. That concept has not been demonstrated and one needs to understand that microorganism live through out the gut and in non–ruminants, such as the horse, there is a significant population of micros in the distal (end) section of the small intestine and there is an opportunity for absorption of those nutrients generated by the micros.
Facts
- Coprophagy is common in foals from 2 weeks to several months of age but more often observed with foals less than 8 weeks of age. Observations have suggested that foals demonstrate a preference for the feces of their dam and seldom eat their own or those of other horses.
- Coprophagy is observed more frequently with confined horses when compared to pasture horses.
-
- For adult horses that appear obsessive with the behavior, the addition of fiber by adding roughages to the diet appears to reduce the frequency of the behavior.
- Exercise appears to reduce the incident of coprophagy in adult horses.
- There has been work from a university suggesting an odor from the feces of the mare may attract the foal to the feces.
Coprophagy is sometimes confused with the term
Pica. Pica is the eating of non-foods such as dirt, sand, bark, twigs, etc. This behavior may be associated with hunger but more commonly is a result of exploratory behavior of the horse which also includes boredom. Mouthing or muzzling objects is one way horses explore their surroundings.
