That's crap!

So here's how it starts, we find a big, fat caterpillar at the park. We bring him home, set him up in the butterfly enclosure that we used to raise Painted Ladies last year. Anyway, I decide to do a little research on the care and keeping of caterpillars, after all, I don't want him to meet his ultimate demise in my care. I would be sad and my son would be devastated! While aquiring other tidbits of information I discover that caterpillar poop is called "frass". Actually, upon further research I find that "frass" is the preferred term for bug poop in general, who knew? Is it just me, or does there seem to be a veritable shit-load of words to describe, well shit? I mean there are the obvious ones like feces, dung and excrement. But what about the more specialized terms? Let's see, we have "guano" for bats and birds, yet bird poop is also described as a "dropping" which seems quite accurate if you ask me! Rodents produce pellets and rabbits also produce pellets, but they also produce things called cecotropes, which are reingested by the rabbit. Hello, call me crazy but I'd rather have 4 stomachs and chew cud than to have to eat anything that comes out my arse, but hey, if it works for them, cool. Elephants produce "balls" (approximately 500 lbs worth in a 24-hour period...call me impressed!), worms produce "vermidung", and whales, bears, and Bigfoot (or would that be Bigfeet?) produce "scat". Actually scat is pretty universally used to describe feces of a many animals, I have heard skunk poop referred to as scat and so on. Let's not forget our farmyard friends, we have manure as a general term and bovidung if we want to be polite, but then there are cow pies or patties, meadow muffins and prairie chips or in Scotland they call it "coo plab" and in Newfoundland they call it "cow plates" (are their cows bigger?). Horses in the country make horse apples, but in the city they make "alley apples" (I guess that's what your local police horse leaves behind!). There are "moose berries", "elk duds" and "deer pellets". And I think it is safe to assume that dog poop could technically be referred to as "contact information"! And as much as I might like to go on, I won't even get started on the infinite variety of words and phrases that we humans use to describe our own excrement. Maybe in another blog, in fact, maybe I'll send out a poll to all my friends to find out their favorite terminology. Stay tuned for that!