With almost a half of households having a dog now, it is easy to understand why we see so many questions relating to keeping dogs.
Recently, we have noticed a number of discussions on social media relating to birds eating dog poop with the discussions often getting heated. On top of this, we have noticed a number of people straight up asking if birds eat dog poop or not too.
Due to seeing so much attention from the dog-owning community about birds eating dog poop, we have decided to publish this article.
Our hope is to try and help our readers better understand why this is such a controversial subject and most of the discussions on social media about it end up getting heated with people on both sides.
We have added a table of contents for our article below to try and make it as easy as possible to navigate the article. This should ensure that you are able to get the information you require as quickly as possible by being able to click the subheaders in the table of contents to skip directly to the relevant sections.
Do Birds Eat Dog Poop?
In certain situations, some species of birds will eat dog poop but it is not a normal part of their diet.
Most species of bird will eat dog poop if other food sources are scares but Magpies seem to be open to eating dog poop year round even if there is other food available.
The majority of the time when a bird does eat bird poop, it is of a small dog breed that is fed a high-quality commercial dog food or a tailor-made dog food.
This is due to many small dog breeds having a very short digestive tract that is unable to digest all of the nutrients in the dog poop.
The higher quality foods tend to use better ingredients too meaning that there is more nutrients available with plenty being leftover once the dog poops.
If there is not many other food sources available during a long winter for example, this can cause a large number of herbivore and omnivore bird species to eat bird poop.
What Birds Eat Dog Poop?
Although a wide range of bird species will eat dog poop if they are hungry enough and the dog poop has plenty of nutrients left over, the most common bird that will seemingly eat bird poop even if there are other food sources in the same yard as the dog poop are magpies.
It is unknown why magpies will happily eat dog poop but it has been observed time and time again.
There have also been videos uploaded to social media of magpies fighting over dog poop to try and establish an order of who gets to eat it first.
To date, they are the only bird to display this behavior on such a frequent basis even when there are other food sources available.
Various types of seagulls are starting to be documented as eating dog poop in parks now too but this is still relatively rare.
There are a number of other documented cases of a wide range of birds eating dog poop too but this is usually much rarer than magpies and seagulls.
Why Do Birds Eat Dog Poop?
Birds who eat dog poop seem to do it for the nutrients that is still in the poop after it has been processed by a dog.
Smaller dog breeds have shorter digestive tracts and when they are fed a rich, high-quality dog food, their poop can still be very nutritious.
We have seen some people claim that certain types of dog treat, mainly peanut butter ones will also attract birds to dog poop too.
We have not been able to find any evidence of this though and it does seem to just be a relatively commonly accepted idea that is probably incorrect.
As we touched on earlier in the article though, magpies will still eat dog poop even if you have bird feeders in your yard or garden right next to the dog’s poop.
It is not known why magpies do this but there are a number of theories shared on social media but in reality, we doubt any of them are correct.
Conclusion
That brings our article going over if birds eat dog poop to an end. We hope that we have been able to help explain why some birds will eat bird poop as well as the situations where they will eat the dog poop too. For the most part, birds will usually prefer other food sources though and it is usually only in very rare situations where a bird will report to having to eat bird poop.
