Coprophagia

Coprophagia, sometimes spelled coprophagy, is the act of eating feces. The word comes from the Ancient Greek roots kopros, meaning feces, and phagein, meaning to eat. The behavior can involve a creature consuming its own waste, the waste of another individual of the same species, or the waste of an entirely different species, and the material may be eaten as soon as it is deposited or taken directly from the anus. In a number of animal species coprophagia is a normal and even necessary part of biology, for example allowing an animal to recover nutrients such as vitamin B12 that its digestive system did not fully extract the first time through, or letting offspring acquire gut microbes from a parent. In most other species, and in humans, the behavior instead signals an underlying problem rather than ordinary function. Documented human cases stretch back to the late nineteenth century and have most often appeared alongside severe mental illness or as an element of particular sexual practices, which is why the atlas treats it as a recognized clinical condition rather than a normal behavior when it appears in a person.