How to Stop Your Dog From Eating Poop

By Jessica Ennis, DVM, CVA

✓ Medically reviewed by Jessica Ennis, DVM, CVA — August 6, 2026 For general education — not a substitute for veterinary care.

Behavior & enrichment · August 10, 2026 · 7 min read

Poop eating usually traces to one of three roots — digestion, boredom, or stress — and the fix only works once you know which one you're dealing with.

Why does a dog who eats a full, balanced dinner turn around ten minutes later and eat something out of the yard that should, by any reasonable measure, be repulsive? Owners ask me this with a mix of disgust and genuine worry, and the honest answer is: it depends which dog you have.

I once worked with a two-year-old Beagle mix named Otis whose owner called on a Tuesday morning, mortified, describing exactly what she’d watched him do in the side yard before his morning walk even started. Otis was food-motivated, fed once a day, and spent most of his afternoons alone in a small fenced yard while his owner worked a hybrid schedule. Nothing on his labs came back abnormal. What changed things wasn’t a supplement or a special diet — it was splitting his one meal into two, adding a fifteen-minute sniff walk before her workday started, and picking up the yard every evening instead of every few days. Within three weeks the behavior had dropped from daily to rare. That timeline matters, because owners often give up on a fix after four or five days when the real signal takes closer to a month to read.

Is this medical, behavioral, or something in between?

The clinical name is coprophagia, and it splits into two useful buckets: dogs eating their own stool and dogs eating other animals’ stool (including cat litter box raids, which is its own conversation). Before assuming it’s “just a gross habit,” it’s worth ruling out digestive causes. Exocrine pancreatic insufficiency — a shortage of the pancreatic enzymes needed to digest food — has been linked to coprophagia since the 1960s, and dogs with EPI typically improve once started on enzyme replacement, according to a review summarized on ScienceDirect Topics: ScienceDirect. But the same review is clear that the enzyme story doesn’t explain most cases: plenty of dogs with normal digestion still do it, and in dogs that do have EPI, enzyme supplementation lowers the behavior without eliminating it outright. In other words, if your dog’s stool is malformed, greasy, or unusually large in volume, that’s worth a vet visit and a fecal panel. If the stool looks normal and the behavior is opportunistic, you’re probably not looking at a digestive disease.

A related question owners raise constantly: does what a dog eats change how appealing its own stool is to it? A study of adult dogs published in Animals and archived on PMC examined how coprophagic behavior interacted with nutrient digestibility and fecal fermentation products — a reminder that diet quality and gut fermentation are part of this picture, even if they’re rarely the whole story.

What actually moves the needle

Here’s where I get decisive, because owners deserve a straight answer rather than a list of eleven maybe-fixes to try all at once. Start with management, not correction. A dog can’t eat what it can’t reach, so the single highest-yield change is picking up the yard daily — not weekly — and keeping your dog leashed and supervised on walks long enough to intercept the behavior before it happens, not after. This beats punishment-based approaches every time, because coprophagia is rarely about defiance; scolding a dog after the fact usually just teaches it to eat the evidence faster next time, which makes the problem harder to see, not easier to solve.

Second, look honestly at feeding structure. According to the American Kennel Club, coprophagia is documented as more common in multi-dog households — about a third of dogs in three-dog homes were reported to have the habit, versus roughly a fifth in single-dog homes — which points toward competition, boredom, and opportunity as real drivers alongside any individual dog’s temperament. If your dog is one of several, feed them separately, in view of each other but not competing for the same bowl, and pick up promptly after each dog goes.

Third, don’t skip enrichment. A dog who is understimulated during the day — home alone in a bare yard, no chew work, no sniffing time — is a dog more likely to fill that gap with something. This is not a dig at owners; most people don’t realize how much of “problem behavior” resolves once a dog’s actual daily needs are being met, not just its calorie needs.

Where stress fits, and where I’d stop short of a supplement fix

Some dogs eat stool as a displacement behavior tied to anxiety, particularly dogs who’ve been through a shelter stay, a recent move, or a stretch of inconsistent routine — the pattern the AKC and most behaviorists describe as one thread among several, not the default explanation. For those dogs, the same calming levers that help with generalized stress are reasonable to consider as one piece of a broader plan, never the whole plan. Chamomile and valerian root have a long history in traditional herbal care for supporting relaxation, per Boops Pets’ vet-reviewed claim list, though for most species — dogs included — the evidence base is still mainly preclinical or drawn from traditional use rather than large clinical trials, per a review in Biomedicines. L-theanine, an amino acid found in tea, has been studied for calming properties, also per Boops Pets’ claim list, and a broader review found meaningful effect sizes in at least one human trial using 400 mg/day over eight weeks — though that data point is human, not canine, and shouldn’t be read as a dog dose, per a review in Molecular Psychiatry. Ashwagandha, specifically the KSM-66 form, is described by Boops Pets as a clinically studied form of the herb for stress support, and a systematic review in Cureus concluded ashwagandha across multiple RCTs has a moderate positive impact on stress reduction and cognitive performance — again, that body of evidence sits mostly in humans.

I say this to clients directly: if your dog’s coprophagia is stress-linked, a calming aid may help support the nervous-system side of the equation while you fix the environment underneath it. It is not a substitute for more exercise, a predictable schedule, and picking up the yard. I’ve seen owners reach for a supplement first because it feels like the fastest lever to pull, and I understand the appeal — but in my experience the dogs who actually stop doing this are the ones whose daily structure changed, not just their supplement drawer.

When to call your vet instead of troubleshooting at home

Any new-onset coprophagia in an adult dog who’s never done it before deserves a vet visit before you try anything else, especially if it comes with weight loss, poor coat, greasy or high-volume stool, or increased appetite that doesn’t translate to weight gain — that combination raises suspicion for EPI or a malabsorption issue and needs bloodwork and a fecal exam, not a training plan. Puppies under a year who do this occasionally are usually within normal range and often outgrow it as their diet and environment stabilize; persistent daily behavior in a puppy still warrants a parasite check, since intestinal parasites can drive the malabsorption that feeds this loop.

The dog I think about most on this topic wasn’t Otis — it was an older Labrador named Sadie, twelve years old, brought in because her owner had noticed loose, unusually pale stool for about two weeks alongside the poop-eating, which was new for her. Sadie had lost close to four pounds without a diet change. Bloodwork and a trypsin-like immunoreactivity test confirmed EPI, and once she started enzyme supplementation with her meals, both the stool changes and the coprophagia improved over the following month. That case is a single dog’s outcome, not a guarantee for every senior dog with new-onset stool eating — but it’s exactly why “new behavior in an older dog” gets a vet visit before a behavior plan.

The verdict

If you take one thing from this guide, let it be sequencing: rule out a digestive cause first if the stool itself looks abnormal or your dog has lost weight, then fix management (pick up the yard daily, supervise walks, feed multi-dog households separately), then address environment and enrichment, and only then consider a calming aid if stress genuinely seems to be the driver. Skipping straight to a supplement without touching the yard, the schedule, or the walk length is the single most common reason owners tell me “nothing worked.” For a broader foundation on diet, exercise, and the daily basics that make behaviors like this easier to manage, our Whole-Dog Wellness: A Practical Starting Guide is a good next stop.