People often make disparaging remarks about animals being dirty or filthy, but is this is fact the case? As someone who daily for a decade has encountered up to thirty different kinds of animal poo, I feel equipped to answer this question. Running a rescue centre, I clean the living quarters of animals as diverse as foxes, ducklings and donkeys. Almost all the mammals we work with make a special area within their enclosure where they go to the toilet. This would be in the wild called a latrine. Our Donkeys, Portia and Sidney, poo together on a pile. This a social activity for the donkeys and allows them to communicate and bond. Our resident Fox, Ronan, poos on a pile of bark chippings on a specially covered litter tray. The rest of his enclosure is more or less immaculate. Our weasel, too, poos in a chosen corner or his large cage, and his bed is always free of faeces and urine. Even our hare uses a toilet.
The animals which get most stick for being dirty are perhaps pigs. Wild pigs species search the ground for food, digging up grubs and roots. They use their snouts to do this. When confined in a small area, pigs dig up the soil and in rainy countries make a terrible mess. Pigs in the wild would never do this as they have infinite space to roam in. Think about it. When you visit a woodland with wild pigs, or even deer or foxes, or birds, there isnt poo everywhere. The reason we think animals are dirty is because we lock them in with their poo. Even in captivity pigs given enough space, pigs will never poo in their beds. Our pigs' bed is always full of clean dry straw, not because we clean them all the time, but because the pigs keep them like that.
Parents of baby songbirds remove the faeces of their young using their beak. The droppings come out encased in sacs with a convenient tear shape forming a handle which the parent picks up and drops away from the nest immediately it comes out. Thus, when we are feeding baby sparrows, starling, chaffinches, robin and other songbirds in our rescue centre, we clean the nests of the babies each time we feed, possibly every hour, replacing the paper towels they are sat in. If we do not do this, the animals may get skin infections or other diseases and die.
Some animals, such a ducks, are very difficult to keep clean in captivity. herbivores produce more faeces than other carnivorous animal because the food contains ;less protein so they must eat continually to get enough nutrition out of it. The more that goes in at the mouth end, the more comes out at the other end. This means geese, ducks, swans, rabbits, hare, guinea pigs etc, produce a lot of poo and need cleaning a lot. Now think of a duckling, a rabbit or a swan in the wild. They move constantly over the ground, grazing. This means that their faeces is cleaned up by rain and soil organisms as they go. When an animal lays a deposit on the ground in the wild, Nature of course has its own systems for removing this. Many tiny animals called detritivores, literally consume the poo making it into harmless and unsmelly soil. The grazer doed not stay in one place (as in a cage) pooing where they stand. This is unnatural and something we have created.
Animal which are kept in conditions which are inappropriate such as never cleaned, cleaned infrequently, or too small, as in many intensive farms or in hutches and cage, end up having no choice but to poo in their bed. This no doubt causes great distress to animals which would otherwise always live in clean environments. Interestingly, I have noticed that animals kept in cramped conditions when you are less likely to develop clean habits when grown. However, other animals can teach younger animals better habits. I have seen this with donkeys. As a general rule we clean each animal every day.
I have seen in the field, that some colonial species such as pigeons, herons and sea birds festoon their nesting areas with faeces but this is very much teh exception rather than the rule. To answer the question are animals dirty, the answer from someone who has worked intimately with animals daily all her life, is NO! And if you have created a scenario where an animal is living in its own mess, this may well be your fault. Try to alter the husbandry to give the animal a chance to keep its home clean. you and the animals will b a lot happier.
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