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A question about eating poop, just out of curiosity...

I think caecotrophs are squishier and have a different smell to them than normal poos. They must feel it or smell it or something. If we want to make it even grosser, I wonder if a piggy would ever take someone else's poop LOL
They will if they have stomach upset. I've seen pigs on antibiotics actively seek out the poop of healthy pigs (much to the dismay of the healthy pig sometimes!) It helps to replenish needed gut flora that are killed by the antibiotics.
 
Piggies whose gut fauna is disturbed or has been wiped out will stick their mouths up their mates' bums (sometimes quite aggressively) to steal any caecotrophs coming their way in order to restart their own microbial biome.

We try to emulate this by feeding poo soup with really fresh and just laid poos from a healthy piggy that have been soaked in water; you sryinge some of that water but need to repeat the whole process each time from scratch because of the need of total freshness to ensure that the gut biome is transferred while still alive.
Caecotrophs would be ideal, but even fresh waste poos contain enough live microbes and bacteria to be effective as long as the poos are really just popped out of a bum.

You can see us regularly recommending poo soup in health/illness threads as an alternative to probiotics. If done correctly, poo soup is in fact more effective than probiotics. ;)

This is also the reason why probiotics are widely recommended in online guinea pig places even though their effectiveness is not proven and still hotly debated. Probiotics are not a medication by the way; they are classed as a food supplement.
 
Probiotics are not a medication by the way; they are classed as a food supplement.

Try telling this to one of my local vets😩 when i had a life or death situation with a guinea pig, they tried to refuse to serve me fiberplex and critical care, saying it was a medication and that i needed a consultation.
 
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