Latest / Privycast / Ep. 193 Groundhog Day 2026: Rabbits, Capybaras, Mountain Beavers, and Poop Vitamins

Transcript

Ep. 193 Groundhog Day 2026: Rabbits, Capybaras, Mountain Beavers, and Poop Vitamins · Privycast

0:02
The round
0:16
I don't know guys.
0:19
Come on let's do it again!
0:24
You're on the ho-
0:32
Yes, sir, there he is.
0:40
Awesome, awesome guys.
0:42
to get Phil fired up.
0:45
Let's get Phil fired up.
0:46
By chanting Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil.
0:55
uh It's really struggling with that hog.
1:08
Yeah, sir.
1:19
Welcome back to Privy.
1:21
Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroom.
1:28
I'm your host, Hunter Hoover, and I love bathrooms.
1:32
Welcome back everyone.
1:33
Thank you so much for being here.
1:35
And if you didn't hear it from the intro stinger for the episode, this episode is being recorded on Groundhog Day.
1:45
Happy Groundhog's Day, everybody.
1:48
Shoot, I got a text in an audible.
1:50
can't believe I've, I can't believe I've bungled this so hard.
1:55
Listeners of the show, if you're, if you're joining us and you're, you're regular here, welcome.
2:00
Thank you for being here.
2:01
And those who've been with us for some time will know that every year on Groundhog's Day, we celebrate God's good creatures by looking specifically at the many strange and
2:15
wonderful things that
2:17
happen with their poop.
2:19
February, yes, yes, there it is.
2:24
It's the Plump Satomi hat.
2:28
You know, for all the, the holidays that we could get absolutely just Jones about in February, you've got presidents day, you've got Valium times day, you've got snooper bowl
2:43
Friday or Sunday or whatever the heck day that they decided to meet for that cult gathering.
2:49
You probably have some other weird thing in there, but today and every year on privy on this.
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week's release, we are commemorating and remembering Groundhog Day.
3:03
And at the point of this episode's release, though, I want to admit, you're listening to this after Groundhog Day has already happened.
3:09
So we already know the results and you might be a little upset at old plumps of Tommy for seeing his shadow.
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He done went and saw it.
3:17
And so there's like six more weeks of winter or something.
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And what people don't get is like, no matter what, whether he sees his shadow or not,
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There's going to be six more weeks of winter.
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Like it's going to be wintry somewhere on this earth.
3:32
And every year to celebrate Groundhog's Day, we dive into look at one of, like I said, God's great creatures and specifically some of the things that happen with, or that is
3:46
strange about their bathroom habits and pooping.
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Over the course of the last few years, we've looked at a number of these, including Groundhogs.
3:54
And I want to also admit.
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In recent years, we've truly strayed from the path a bit about looking at animal poop.
4:05
We've talked about bears and cats and koalas and all sorts of strange poop-bearing creatures.
4:14
And it's been fun.
4:15
We've learned a lot.
4:16
We've learned a lot about animals and the stuff that they skeet, which is kind of cool.
4:21
Everybody skeets and that includes animals.
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And we learned a lot about
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our bathroom habits from looking at these animals.
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And it's a reminder that even the animal world has some amount of respect for cleanliness.
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But not all bathroom lessons that we might learn by observing our animal friends are transferable.
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We're gonna find that out pretty quickly as we dive into today's episode.
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Before we jump just solely deep into this pig, we're going to take a brief detour, a privy detour, boxer brief detour into the world of vitamins and minerals.
5:13
Now, for our purposes in this episode, we need to be looking at primarily two vitamins.
5:21
That is vitamin B, particularly vitamin B12 and vitamin K.
5:26
Now, what are vitamins?
5:27
The short version and the scientific version is science has figured out that there are certain rocks that do certain things inside our bodies when those rocks make it inside of
5:40
our bodies.
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And when our bodies begin to break down those very good rocks, it benefits our bodies in direct, tangible ways.
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One of these good rocks is vitamin B12.
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And vitamin B12 is pretty good.
5:53
It helps your nervous system.
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And that doesn't mean like, I'm nervous.
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I'm a real nervous squirvus.
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No, it's like your nerves and the endings and the reaction and stuff like that.
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It also helps with red blood cell production.
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brain function helps give you more energy, can prevent anemia.
6:13
And in short, vitamin B12 is good stuff.
6:16
It's like an energizing vitamin.
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And if you've ever drunk one of them, one of them Big Gulp energy drinks, it probably has vitamin B12 in it because like vitamin B12 as a natural good rock that we sup,
6:31
accomplishes a lot of the same things that energy drinks want to accomplish for us.
6:38
Vitamin B12 for most of us carnivorous folks, which means we like to dine on the animal flesh.
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It often comes from animal products that we eat, particularly meat.
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And so for those of you out there, of you, who do not eat meat, which, know, okay, we gotta have the groundhog visible.
7:00
We gotta have it visible.
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Okay.
7:02
Often we'll need to get your vitamin B12, very good vitamin rocks, from a different source.
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There's fortified foods, foods that they've like put the vitamin B12 into to help like you be ready to have vitamin B12 even though you're not eating food that naturally has it.
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Often this is grains and produce and stuff like that.
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You can also get your vitamin B12 unnaturally in a capsule that you take once per day known as a multivitamin.
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And if you can't get enough B12,
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In your diet, some of the things that you might experience are tiredness, weakness, nerve issues, irritability, can lead to shortness of breath.
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Not great.
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Very bad.
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Similarly, vitamin K supports bone health and helps blood clotting and other heart healthiness.
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And I'll note there's two types of vitamin K.
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There's vitamin K1, which you can get from those leafy greens.
8:01
I've been snacking down leafy greens hard for the past four or five months.
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Really getting uh a steady flow of the leafy greens.
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And vitamin K2, which is again, it's going to come from animal products.
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You need both, both are good for you.
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And you can also find similarly fortified foods.
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If you're not getting your normal intake of protein animal products to get the B12 and the K.
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Or again, you can pop a very good capsule to get those vitamins straight into the system.
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Pop the bites, get the poops.
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It's all connected.
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And if you don't have enough vitamin K, you may be susceptible to excessive bleeding, bruising, easily having weak bones.
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And again, it's not great.
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You want these things in your system.
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And so all of these vitamins and all this vitamin talk, I'm starting to sound like a GNC over here, trying to sell you some weird flippin' supplement so you can like become more
9:02
powerful or whatever.
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they're trying to accomplish with this stuff.
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And that's all well and good.
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We have the vitamin aisle and multiple grocery stores and it's easy to track down vitamins if we're not getting them in our daily diet.
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But the question is, and the question that we want to explore on this Groundhog's Day episode of Privy is what do you do if you are one of God's beautiful forest, mountain,
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valley, or desert creatures?
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And you don't have science which tells you that the good rocks and the very nice vitamins are necessary and where they are and how you can obtain them.
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And what if even worse, you as one of God's very good creatures don't have the necessary equipment, equipment in your mouth.
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That's what, or in your digestive tract down in the tummy buddies.
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for consuming the animal products and thus being able to break them down and receive these vitamins the natural way.
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If you're surviving as one of these beautiful creatures in nature, having excessive bleeding, tiredness, weak bones, being out of energy, out of breath, it's not like for us
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humans.
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Like if I'm tired on most given days, I'm gonna slam some coffee.
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I'm going to maybe take it a little slow.
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Maybe go to bed a little earlier that night.
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But like no mountain beast is going to hunt me down and gut me like a fish.
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I'm going to be fine.
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Generally speaking.
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I'll take a fat nap.
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But if I'm like a small mountain rabbit and I'm sluggish and whatever, something's going to eat me in the woods.
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It's going to track me down and, and snack me real hard.
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Just sup and sup and dump.
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And so.
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being tired and being weak are not conducive for these great creatures, for them being alive.
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And so they don't have pharmacies and cars and all the things that we have for us to go procure these vitamins if we're not getting them out of nature.
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And so there has to be a new, more creative way for them to get these nutrients that they would
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otherwise not be able to take in.
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Their means for doing so, their means for getting these nutrients puts them in a category of creature called a coprophagious creature.
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Now, coprophagy is the behavior typically in animals.
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I would like to say only in animals, but like,
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As we're going to find out, that's not the case.
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Where in the animal eats their own feces as a vital process of gaining the needed nutrients to support their ongoing health.
12:13
Woof.
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Literally woof because dogs do this all the time.
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They be eating some skeet.
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It should be noted there are different categories of coprophagy.
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Autocoprophagy is when the animal eats their own feces to help bolster this process.
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Allocoprophagy is when they eat the feces of the same species.
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The feces of the same species.
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I'm a poet, but it's not their own.
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So it's like, I'm not going to eat some other type of creature stuff, like, get my great uncle Greggy over here and let him skeet a fat stack and all, and I'll make, I'll get my
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vitamin B12s from that.
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Heterospecific.
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Nice hetero.
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Coprophagy is when they eat hetero.
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Get it?
13:09
The same.
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The poop are no different.
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Dang it, the same as a homo.
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I messed it up.
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I forgot.
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That's my bad.
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That's my bad.
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But a heterospecific coprophagy is when they eat the poop of other creatures that are different than them.
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And I'm going be honest with you.
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I'm not really sure which of those options are the worst, to tell you the truth.
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Like it's a real head scratcher.
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It's a, it's a classic, like poop sandwich or like, do you want a poop sandwich or a fart sandwich?
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It's a bad choice all around.
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More literally though, this one might be a poop sandwich for these animals, but we don't just want to look at general coprophagous creatures.
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There are many reasons an animal would
13:58
engage in coprophagy.
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Some do it to kind of min-max their digestion, monkeys and other things like they got to get maximized their gains.
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Others engage in this behavior as a primary food source, dung beetles being an example there.
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Still others do it as a means of actually activating their own digestive system to prepare it for consuming and breaking down other
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harder to break down things.
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We've talked about koalas engaging in this in the past, the such.
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But the animals that we want to look at this week and on this episode of Privy are creatures who engage in coprophagy as a means of supplementing or gaining their essential
14:47
vitamins, particularly vitamin B12, vitamin K.
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It all comes together.
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Why did Hunter talk so long about all those vitamins and nutrients and supplements at the beginning?
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Like usually he gets all the weird diet-y stuff out in January and he didn't really do that.
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So maybe he's here in February.
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No, no, I'm not wasting our Groundhog Day special to talk about vitamins.
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That would be stupid.
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And so to begin,
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We gotta talk a little bit about who these beautiful creatures are on this Groundhog Day special episode of-
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Creatures who engage in this coprophagous behavior in order to get these specific nutrients seem to be in these specific categories.
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Rabbits of pretty much all types of rabbit, small rodents and other mountain rodents of various types, including the mountain beaver, capybaras, and in some occasions where
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malnourishment occurs, pigs.
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The next time you're on a game show.
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and they ask you, what characteristic unites beavers, rabbits, capybaras, and pigs?
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While you could say mammal, it would be more interesting if you said, yes, these are all animals that eat their own poop.
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And what's weird is there's actually a pattern in how these animals do this thing.
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Rabbits eat a portion of their poop called Cicotropes, which is a particularly soft type of feces.
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Why did, you know, I'm trying to think.
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Like I think it's worse.
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I'm trying to like wrap my brain around this.
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But for me, it's worse.
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Like if you're going to eat a turd, I think I want it to be hard.
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Like, I mean, I'm not going to eat nothing.
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This is not an experimental episode.
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This is a science animal loving episode.
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I've got, I've got the groundhog hat.
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This is not science mic hat.
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But like.
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In my brain, I want it to be more solid.
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I don't know.
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I think it's just easier to interface with.
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think that's where I'm at on that.
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Capybaras seem to engage in this behavior, particularly in the morning, so as to help with absorption throughout the rest of the day.
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And so we begin to ask ourselves.
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What would cause these creatures to engage in this behavior?
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And in short, they often engage in this.
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It's a feeling within the animal.
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You know, they have to validate their feelings.
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We're teaching animals and humans who maybe sometimes think they are to validate themselves left and right out here.
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Well, the crumpy, the crumpy barbras and the reboots and the, the mountain mice.
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And the mountain beavers, nice mountain beavers, woof.
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They feel on their insides as if there's something wrong.
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So you got to validate their feelings.
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Dang it.
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But this feeling causes them to do this.
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And then once they eat their poop, it alleviates that feeling and they return to that behavior because, well, it helped the weird bad feeling that I had go away once.
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Maybe if I jump back in and go round two, it'll help me feel better again.
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How many people only take their multivitamins because they feel bad?
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It's usually because they've made a habit of it.
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But these creatures, the science of why they're diving into their poop is to obtain vitamins they would not otherwise get.
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All of the creatures I listed are plant eating creatures.
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And again,
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They're primarily unable to obtain vitamin B12 and vitamin K without doing so.
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All these creatures are herbivores, which means they eat the herb and not that one.
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Uh, and as such, they're not eating animal products like I am.
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I had some animal products today.
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You know what I'm saying?
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A little salami.
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They call me, they call me Sammy salami.
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I had some cheese.
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What else animal products do have?
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I had a couple hot dogs.
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think that's technically an animal product.
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I'm going to say it is.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, we're going to say it is.
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But these creatures have to do this to eat the So what's going on?
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Why would these creatures eating their poop do anything to help the vitamin intake situation?
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In short, as far as nature is concerned,
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It's a matter of the creature doing a thing and feeling they're better for it and then repeating it as a result.
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The capabara, the crappy Barbara realizes when he starts his day with a hot brown stack of whack, he feels better.
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He feels more ready to take on his day.
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He's got more energy.
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He doesn't feel as weak.
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His bones feel stronger.
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And you can't blame the guy.
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I mean, maybe you could.
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He is eating his own poop.
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But he's doing it because he feels better as a result.
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Research was conducted to figure out like, but like why?
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Like usually this research is done in vets or zoos or other locations where the poop eating behavior can be easily observed.
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And as they would do it, they would be taking blood and other stool samples and comparing those tests of the creatures who were allowed to eat crap and those who were not.
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And when the ones eating poop are doing better, it begins to like beg the question, what is in the poop that they are eating that is producing this benefit in them?
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And so science begins to do what science does best, root around in that scoot.
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They note what changes.
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And there's a number of benefits.
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First off is there's an added level of water absorption.
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There's some water that is lost in the process of passing a turd.
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And when these animals eat those turds, especially animals who live in a drier climate, they can actually recoup some lost hydration.
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Not exactly the path forward that I'd take, but again, I'll just fill up my Nalgene and I'm good.
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They don't have Nalgenes, silly, crumpy barbers, silly rabbits.
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Nalgenes are for humans.
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Maybe you ought to get one.
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I'm sure there's some sort of weird, ridiculous government spending that exists out there somewhere that's like, have to install Nalgene water droppers for the wild rabbits so they
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don't have to eat their own poop and they can get some more hydration.
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So that way, and it's like, you know, yeah, they're also re-digesting some of the undigested food parts that made it through the first time.
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They're also introducing
22:33
new microbiota or like micro bacterias to their tummies from round one.
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And it turns out many of these creatures in eating their own poop show that they were able to recover those missing vitamin B12 and K nutrients they would have otherwise been
22:54
lacking.
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And so like
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What happens in the gut of these creatures?
23:03
In short, like what goes on?
23:06
Because they eat the plants which don't have as much of these things and then they poop, but those vitamins and minerals seem to be present in the poop to the point where when
23:18
they eat the poop, they gain the vitamins.
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It's like nature's little multivitamin nugget.
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Tell that the next time somebody tells you to grab a rabbit turd and hand it to them, say.
23:28
Take two and call me in the morning, doc.
23:31
I'm not a doctor.
23:33
Just putting it out there.
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In short, the microbiota, the gut biome of these creatures is producing and has naturally occurring sources of vitamins, particularly vitamin K and vitamin B12.
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And some of these vitamins are not absorbed and are actually missed on first pass.
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It's as if the microbiomes of the mountain beaver and the mountain rabbit and the crampy Barbara and the mountain mice.
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actually introduce it like produces the vitamins in the guts of the animals and actually puts it into the.
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And so, to get access to the vitamins that their own guts are producing, they have to eat what their gut produced, namely their own feces.
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When these animals eat their poop, they are much like countless humans do daily with a large glass of water, taking their daily multivitamin.
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Hold that wisdom.
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Hold that wisdom in your brain the next time you get ready to pop some rocks.
24:51
You know what saying?
24:52
Like when you get ready to sling back some vitamins, really sling back some supplements, remember, you
25:02
Don't have to eat your own poop to recoup vitamins.
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Capybaras, rabbits, mountain beavers are all our coprophagous friends who got to go back for seconds on their skeet to get those sweet, sweet vitamins.
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It's tough.
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It's a tough look.
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But like, what are the implications?
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The animal kingdom has given us yet another gift via their poop.
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In short, the idea is this.
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What's good for one has to be good for all.
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While humans are not readily turning to snacking their own stack for vitamin B12 and vitamin K because they've got other means.
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for obtaining those vitamins that we discussed at the beginning of this episode.
25:59
They have, as we've discussed in the past on our show, turned to poop to try to remedy and begin to figure out some various tummy troubles and ailments that can arrive and arise
26:14
throughout their lives.
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Go check out our fecal medical transplant or our poop transplant episode and in short,
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They, medicine has figured out that if you introduce poop into the system, it'll help restore some level of gut health to those whose gut microbiome has suffered to the point
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where they're unable to like digest.
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I don't know.
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For creatures.
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And for centuries, for centuries, vitamin B12 was primarily obtained through animal products or the bacteria that just kind of existed in our world.
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But as hygiene standards increased, secondary opportunities to get this vitamin naturally have actually diminished.
27:10
But that's okay.
27:11
Everybody eats meat and animals though, right?
27:16
And then vegans.
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In extreme cases of veganism, it's led to feelings of anemia and in some instances, actually producing anemia in the person.
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And while the easy solution is just like eat a fricking cheeseburger.
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If you're opposed to the sweet cheesy bees.
27:40
This led many scientists in the nights to ask, what could we learn from our animal friends?
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There were a series of experiments.
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done in the 90s wherein they took a group of vegan people who had experienced these symptoms and not wanting to take any animal products, sought to obtain vitamin B12 by
28:05
isolating it from their stool.
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I want to note, this is not the same as what our animal friends do.
28:14
Our animal friends do truly eat their own turds, but like
28:20
The idea was this, you have plant eating creatures who have similar problems of tiredness and fatigue and the like.
28:30
And when those animals eat their own poop, it like helps treat that condition that they have.
28:38
And so if you had a plant eating human being, could that plant eating human being eat their own skeet to recoup similar
28:50
vitamins and minerals.
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Now, while the humans are not like snack in a stack, it's under this premise that humans like many animals would produce vitamin B12 in their intestinal tract.
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But that humans do so in a part of the tract that is actually too far down the line for absorption.
29:14
And as such, those vitamin B12s that are very good and would be normally helpful
29:20
or actually passed.
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They pooped out, if you will.
29:26
And so the premise of these experiments in the 90s was that your poop is chock full of vitamin B12.
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And it turns out that was actually correct.
29:40
And so the question was, can we take those turds and isolate the material?
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That's science for extracted.
29:54
by cooking it or boiling it or mixing it with water.
29:57
Somehow we're to do something to this turret.
30:00
Somebody drops a fatty.
30:02
Like, you know what?
30:02
In the name of science, I'm going to interface with that log.
30:06
So I can extract some very good nutrients out of it, I guess.
30:10
Like, let's put the animal kingdoms to us.
30:14
Once those vitamins and minerals have been extracted from the turd, they are then reintroduced to the human.
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And they did show, and it did improve the vitamin B12 levels in those test vegans.
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In some cases, it even helped with their feelings and conditions of anemia.
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And much of this was likely produced within their system.
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If they ingested little to no B12 up top, the poop had
30:49
higher levels and upon ingesting the extracted B12 after the fact, it was absorbed and increased the amount.
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Seems they were onto something.
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It's like we are a little vitamin B12 battery, if you will.
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And so in this episode of Priti for Groundhog Day, what the capybara, the rabbit and the mountain beaver know instinctually?
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Get it?
31:18
In stink truly because of like turds and stink.
31:24
Humans had to science their way into discussions of eating poop.
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It's a wild world.
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And what's even more baffling is the fact that it might actually have worked.
31:38
I'm going to stick to multivitamins myself.
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This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
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Thank you so much for being here.
31:50
Thank you for joining us.
31:52
Happy Groundhog Day.
31:53
We got some exciting stuff.
31:55
We're working on some store.
31:56
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32:02
Click that right now.
32:04
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32:10
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32:14
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32:19
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32:40
and Living Water International as a reminder to keep pooping in the free world.
32:44
This free world was not always free and in pursuit of cleaner water for all.
32:48
Everybody deserves it, but not everybody has it yet.
32:52
Leave us a rating review.
32:53
We would love to do that.
32:55
Send us an email privycast at gmail.com.
32:57
We'd love to hear from you.
32:58
Episode feedback, comments, concerns, questions, all those things privycast at gmail.com.
33:05
Thanks again to Kevin and Pottington for the use of their music.
33:07
You can find links.
33:09
to all music used down in the description below.
33:12
to all our sources are of course down in the ding dong below.
33:16
This brings us to the end of the episode of Privy.
33:19
Thank you for being here.
33:20
Thank you for listening.
33:21
Keep pooping in the free world.
33:22
Own your stank and take your vitamins and not real slide back slide ones.
33:26
And now, as always, don't forget to flush.