Eating Shit

[Lionel Mandrake]

1. Metaphorically

When someone tells you to "eat shit and die", that's an expression of extreme hostility, but it's not meant to be taken literally.

Likewise, when you see this sign on the back of a truck:

[font size="4"]How am I driving?
1-(800)- [/font] EAT - SHIT

it's a joke. You're supposed to laugh. (I always do.)

2. Literally

We've all had shit in out diets. Insects deposit it in and on fruits. Disreputable meat packers put it in sausages, as Upton Sinclair pointed out. When people are starving, as they were during the siege of Leningrad, they will eat bread made of sawdust and shit.

Eating shit is normal for some of the cutest and cuddliest animals. Baby koalas eat their mothers' shit, which contains bacteria they need in order to digest leaves. Rabbits eat their own shit to get nutrients that passed through their guts the first time around.

Sorry about the ick factor. Nature is like that.

[CurtEastPoint]

1. Or as in 'The Help'...

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. My dear Lionel Mandrake!

Who knew you could learn from shit?

Sorry...couldn't resist!

Actually, I didn't know that about baby koalas.

[trof]

5. Shit happens...

they say.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

9. just don't fall back in it -

and now you know the rest of the story

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

3. People eat shit in the novels of the Marquis de Sade

I had a college class on his works. I remember a scene where a nobleman begged a female orgy participant to please come lay a brown egg in his mouth while he was in the heat of passion.

[Lionel Mandrake]

10. Did the Much Maligned Marquis actually

do the things he wrote about, or did he just make up stories?

Was de Sade a sadist?

[trof]

4. I've had dogs who loved 'cat crunchies'.

Had to make the litter box 'less dog accessible'.

[Lionel Mandrake]

6. Our cats always went in and out through the pet door,

so the dog never had a chance to sample cat shit.

The dog liked to eat used kleenex, so we had to cover the wastebaskets.

She would also drink out of the toilet if the lid was up.

[Archae]

7. My sister visited Greece, and has a puzzling experience.

On a lot of Greek cars was a sticker of a hand outline held up like we would hold up our hand saying "stop."

She was baffled by this, and asked me about it when she got back home.

I looked it up, turns out in Greece (and a couple other European countries) a hand held up is "Shit in your face."

[HopeHoops]

8. Yes, rabbits eat their own shit. They double process food (much like cows but without the cud).

We own one. The first pass breaks down the fibers and the second pass is for absorbing the nutrients. It's also amazing how 2nd pass shit a rabbit can produce. Ours self-potty trained. He used his food bowl at first and we couldn't figure that out because we didn't know about the 2-pass digestion at the time. We gave him another bowl to use as a potty and that's just what he does. Virtually all of his 2nd pass berries and urine end up in the potty. He drops the 1st pass ones on his bed (large square plate, formerly a sequence of increasingly large glass/ceramic casserole dishes) and they either get kicked out on the floor or re-eaten. Man can that thing eat! He's a runt and is still tiny, but as a food processor he is stiff competition even for that Japanese guy who ate all those hot dogs.

Bunny berries are also candy as far as our dogs are concerned - and don't get me started on catbox crunchies.

[fizzgig]

11. and then there is the eating shit i did the other day

as in i tripped and ate shit