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Hey, welcome to The Short Stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry, Dave. Let's go.

All right, this is our episode on Dog Beep.

That's right. You can't say poop.

Dog poop. White dog poop.

Specifically, white dog poop. The same white dog poop that Sarah Silverman saying about same white dog poop that shows up in Step Brothers, which is probably the only reason why people who were born after the late '80s are aware that white dog poop even ever existed.

I don't know the Sarah Silverman bit, and I've seen Step Brothers a bunch, and I don't remember the white dog poop in that one.

Those neighborhood bullies, the kids, they make Will Ferrell touch his tongue to the.

White dog poop. Oh, yeah. You know what? Until you sent this, I didn't notice that I don't notice white dog poop anymore.

Oh, really? I definitely did. It was a mainstay while we were growing up. It was a thing. When you were walking down the sidewalk in your neighborhood and you would just look to your left in somebody's yard, there were piles of white dog poop. You do not see that these days.

I never thought about it until you sent this. 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 '80s.

That is absolutely wrong.

Yeah, it's calcium, right?

Yeah, the diet of dogs changed dramatically in the late '80s, early '90s. 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.

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 calcium is good to dogs. 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.

Yeah, I think IFL Science compared it to when humans take vitamins and we don't absorb all of it, it just comes out in our PE. Same thing with calcium in dogs' diets. After they have as much as they need, they just pass it in their poop. And then also one of the other problems with dog food in the 60s, 70s, and 80s is that the 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 '80s.

What.

Was your dog's name?

Well, there were a few, but Dinglebells, JB, 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. We went to the shelter and brought her home. She just looked at us and jumped right over the fence and we're like, Oh, this one's going to be trouble. And she was, but she was a great dog. And then the other one was LL, L. L. Bean. Those are the two dogs I had in the '80s.

That's great. That's a very '80s dog name. L. L. Bean?

Yeah, she was so sweet. I'll just tell you one anecdote real quick. L. L. Was, I guess, a shepherd mix, Doberman Shepherd mix, 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 just had the old soul thing going on. She was roommates with a dog named Hershey, a little schnauzer. Hershey would fall into the pool every once in a while. Ll, who was a great swimmer, would go in and swim over to Hershey and push her, nudge her toward the steps so they could both get out. I saw it more than once. That's how good a dog LL was.

Well, very quickly then, I, as a child, had the big two were Huggy Bear and Bow. Nice. 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 talked about it before, but we kept our dogs outside. My parents did that. We had a big, probably quarter-acre dog, Finston Dogpin, 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 laying in their doghouse crying.

That's sweet. How old were you?

I don't remember. Probably like nine or 10.

Man, that is sweet, Chuck.

Would be a guess. But anyway, you were talking before we digressed, about your dogs in the '80s.

Oh, yeah. We both had dogs in the '80s, and we could attest that their poop didn't come out white. It magically became white as time wore on.

That's right. We could stop here with some heartwarming stories and the answer to that question. But because we do what we do, we're going to talk more about dog food and dog poop right after this. The judge. The judge.

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There's a place beyond this place. A middle ground between the light and the darkness, the Nader and the Xenith. For some, it's a bridge between the living and the dead. Yet for others, it's something else entirely. It's the place where our nightmares dwell. Each one of us has touched the other side and felt the presence of something beyond this world. Welcome to hip hop horror stories. I'm your host, Belly. And each week, we're going to take you to the limits of your imagination as we explore the reality of abnormal experiences. I believe in this shit for real, and the stories you're about to hear.

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All right, we promised to talk more about dog food. It used to be not as good, like we said, full of bonemeal and stuff like that. But after World War II, 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 15-20 years. But even back then, people realize, manufacturers realized that there was a 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.

15 years. 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. They started putting... Well, horse was actually earlier in the century, before World War II. Then everybody was like, This is just wrong. Somehow we can't put our finger on it, but we are not going to feed our dogs horse meat anymore. After World War II, 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 terrible, and they came loaded with calcium.

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 what you should be feeding your pets. Everything points to real food. If you're the best pet owner in the world, you're cooking your dog food and vegetables and stuff like that. Right.

Yeah, for sure. Yomi cooks that for all the time. There's also some pretty good stuff you can order, too.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

But yeah, I think that probably dogs have the healthiest diet as a group now in their entire history with humans.

Yeah, absolutely. Dogs love veggies. I feed my dogs 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 human food. I rarely see them turn their little noses up at anything.

Yeah, for sure. My mom will eat stuff I won't eat, like peas.

Oh, I love peas.

So you said that dog food got better and better. The thing is the reason why white dog poop suddenly disappeared is because it suddenly got better around the late '80s and '90s. People started being like, Stop selling us this stuff. It's not good for our dogs. There was a quick change in the industry, and that led to lower amounts of calcium, which led to lower amounts of white dog poop until it essentially just went away.

Yeah, they got more fiber in their diet now and just 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.

And there's also like, it's still not done. Dogs definitely eat better than ever, but we're still like, Well, wait a minute. Can they exist on a vegan diet? 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 wet. The jury is still out, but it is clear that dog food is healthier than it ever has been in the history of dog food.

Yeah, 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 going grain-free back then. And we kept on that train through this new batch.

Yeah, I've seen green can be hard on dogs sometimes. It's not uncommon from what I saw, too. And then fats, too. Depending on the 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 for the dog because they have to eat the most boring, bland diet imaginable.

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?

Yeah. If you see white poop now and it's speckled white, that's probably worms and you want to do something about that.

Yeah. And if you see the old school white poop, that means someone's living '70s style. Someone's got a big stash of, I'm not going to name check any brands, but what we fed people in the '80s or what we fed dogs in the '80s.

They also raw diets often contain ground up bones, and that can cause the old school white dog poop, too.

Yeah. So normal dog poop is a tube of poop. It should be firm, and it should be like a light.

Chocolatey brown. Yeah, that's thanks to our friends at All Dogs Poop, the Dog Waste Cleaning Service.

Which is amazing. What should it not look like?

Well, if it's orange, it means that your dog is not digesting it slowly enough. It's just passing through largely undigested or too undigested, and it'll come out orange and you want to look into that.

What if it's yellow?

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 switch their diet radically in all of a sudden.

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 mow on weeds and grass, but that can come out in the poop as grass.

What about gray?

It doesn't change much. Gray is no good. That means you got too much fat in.

The diet. Yeah, and again, that can lead to pancreatitis.

And finally, Red.

Yeah, especially if there's red streaks. 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, tarry 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 into the poop earlier and more completely than something like the blood that's red streaky. That means it's happening in the lower digestive tract.

Yeah, I've been a wash in dog poop lately because very sadly, our 14-year-old, Charlie, is becoming a little bit incontinent.

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 saying, I can make it to the door and asked to be let out.

Oh, poor Charlie.

Yeah, it's no fun, but you don't put a dog down because you don't like cleaning up.

Their poop. No, you just yell at them.

We're cleaning up a lot of dog beep.

Did you say dog beep? Yeah. I'm sorry about that.

That's all right. It's no fun. But especially when you wake up in the middle of the night and the smell wakes you up.

Yeah, that's not good.

And aging is no fun. Aging animals are... It's no fun. But we're in the middle of it. What are you going to do?

Just yell at the dog.

No, stop saying that.

We want to thank our friends at IFL Science, Mental Floss, All Dogs Poop, and KSNF out of Joplin, Missouri, for the info for this one.

You're listening to KSNF, All Dog Poop Talk all the time.

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