Talk:Avoiding drinking dirty stream water but drinking from elephant dung instead

From BearWiki

any experienced guide in the the savannah will tell you that elephant dung IS in fact sterile, making it literally impossible for it to carry any kind of dangerous bacteria. this has been common knowledge to african natives for ages.

If you had read the article, it references scienticific papers talking about *what types* of bacteria live in elephant dung, let alone whether they live there or not. Dung of all kinds is the antithesis of sterile. Just because Bear makes a ridiculous claim like that doesn't make it true. -- Rei 11:22, 20 August 2007 (CDT)

Oppose: No Bear supporter, but I am confused about this one. In an Animal Planet show "Echo of the Elephants", a baby elephant was shown eating its mother's dung. It was explained that dung contained nutricious materials that remained undigested, thus making it healthy for elephant babies during the first few weeks after birth (or something like that). Seems to me this would not be the case if it was swarming with potentionally lethal bacteria. Could anyone confirm this?

Support: I've read about that. They actually eat it *for* the bacteria[1]. It helps pass on the intestinal flora from the mother to the infant. While the fecal-oral route is a major way to pass on disease, without intestinal bacteria, no animal can digest cellulose. Since cellulose is what elephants survive off of, without said bacteria, they would die. It's well worth the risk for them.

Support: Well, in that case, the claim would be confirmed - elephant dung is not sterile, and drinking water from it would be a no-no. Since humans use a similar mechanism for acquiring gut flora (at birth and immediately afterwards[2]), as an adult human, Bear would already have the proper bacteria balance maintained by his body. Introducing more bacteria could potentially disrupt this balance, as well as his health. Surely not helpful in a survival situation!

Support: From the same site, different page, as the article quotes:

From the age of six months, calves will eat the mother’s dung in order to infect themselves with micro-organisms that are essential in the digestion of the coarse vegetation that is the staple diet.([3]) Considering that corpophagia is a normal activity for a species in which "the elephant's guts are perhaps its weakest point." I would question whether or not the stuff in the dung is really that bad. Also, keep in mind that not all bacteria is bad for you. Like elephants, we have bacteria in our gut which we would die without. This is why it is advisable to eat yogurt after a course of anti-biotics, as the bacteria cultures which make up yogurt help to restore the natural gut bacteria.

Oppose: Human dung has "gut bacteria" too. Does that mean that it's safe to eat? Does that change the laundry list of infectious diseases and parasites found above? Including the virtually standard worm cysts that are so common in wild elephants? If an elephant doesn't get bacteria in its intestines to help break down cellulose, it will starve. In that situation, eating parasite-infested dung isn't a bad idea. But it's never a better idea for someone who needs water than water that *might* be contaminated by dung or rot. You drink from dung from wild elephants, you're virtually guaranteed to be drinking a mix of potentially deadly bacteria and parasites. -- Rei 11:37, 14 April 2008 (CDT)