Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to the short Stuff, Josh Chuck, Jerry Dave.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Let's get all right, this is our episode on dog poop.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
That's right, you can't say poop.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Dog poop, white dog poop.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Those neighborhood bullies, the kids they make Will Ferrell touch
his tongue to the white dog.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
That is absolutely wrong.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, it's calcium, right.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
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,
(02:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
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
(02:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
What was your dog's name?
Speaker 1 (02:57):
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.
(03:18):
Those are the two dogs I had in the eighties.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
That's great, that's a very eighties dog name.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
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
(03:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
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.
(04:26):
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
(04:46):
laying in their doghouse.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Crying that sweet hew old were you, I.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Don't remember, probably like nine or ten.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Man, that is sweet Chuck would be a guest.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
But anyway, you were talking before we digressed about your
dogs in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
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
(05:43):
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
(06:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
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
(06:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
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
(07:24):
stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Yeah for sure, Like Mama will eat stuff I won't eat,
like peas.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Oh I love peas.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
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
(08:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
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
(09:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
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
(10:06):
for the dog because they have to eat the most
boring blane diet imaginable.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah. If you see white poop now and it's speckled white,
that's probably worms and you want to do something about that.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
They also raw diets often contain ground up bones, and
that can cause the old school white dog poop too.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, So normal dog poop is a tube of poop.
It should be firm and it should be like a
light like chocolatey brown.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah, that's thanks to our friends at All Dogs Poop,
the dog waste cleaning service.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Which is amazing. What should it not look like?
Speaker 1 (11:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
What if it's yellow.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
What about don't.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Doesn't change much? Gray is no good? That means you're
you got too much fat in the diet.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Yeah, and again that can lead to pancreatitis.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
And finally, red.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
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
(12:22):
completely than something like the blood that's red streaky, that
means it's happening in the lower digestive tract.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
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
(12:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
No, you just yell at them.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
So you just we're cleaning up a lot of dog
beep lately.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Did you say dog beep? Yeah, I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
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?
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Just yell at the dog.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
No, stop saying that.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
You're listening to K s n F Oh dog poop
talk all the time.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
That's right, and that means short stuff is up.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
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