Nothing can shit at greater amounts other than a rabbit or rat, is a ferret. Yes, the title may be misleading, but I promise you they are weasels at heart. My mischief bunch produce an impressive amount of shit in the span of 3 days which causes me to be very uptight with a cleaning regiment. My rats are not as bad, they poop in little pellets and it’s much easier to clean. However, ferrets, very different story. They can have very smelly shits and ferrets themselves are stinky, so I give them vitamins and treats that have helped IMMENSLY with their odor. I have made the joke multiple times to my mother that we don’t need a composter, we just need to let the ferrets do their business and when I clean the cage, she has free waste. She was not amused by my suggestion, but she didn’t deny that it could possibly work. Rat shit would probably break down easier because they have a plant-based diet, versus that of a ferret that has a meat-based diet. Ferret shit, if left long enough, can mold and trust me when I say they are very good at hiding where they poop at times, which is why I watch them like a hawk and make sure they do their business in their cage instead of somewhere in my dorm room. Most people see ferrets and think of dirty, disgusting animals, the same for rats, but neither of them is that bad. Rats are very hygienic animals, obsessed with being clean and looking their best, while ferrets will clean and groom each other on a constant basis as a way of taking care of one another. So, yes, they are dirty in some ways, but aren’t humans dirty too? We shit, we make messes, we can smell, but that doesn’t lessen our value, it just makes us who we are in the end: animals. Everything poops, some are just worse than others.
My family has had pets my whole life. We’ve had rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, ducks, hamsters, rats, and a cat, and with that comes an awful lot of shit. When you have pets, especially ones living in your house, their waste needs to be dealt with. I find the difference between the way we deal with animal waste and human waste interesting. When dealing with animal poop, we usually have to be relatively hands-on, it can’t really be avoided due to the systems and routines that have been established, whereas, with human waste, it’s immediately removed from sight, requiring very little interaction on our part.
I have a couple of thoughts as to why it’s like this. My first thought is that animal poop (some kinds more than others), is less offensive to our senses. It’s usually smaller, less smelly, and in the case of some animals, visually different. I know I personally have a smaller reaction to changing a rabbit litter box than a cat litter box, perhaps because rabbit poop looks and smells so different from our own, while cat poop looks and smells more similar. I think this could also be somewhat related to the shame associated with our own shit. When we have to deal with animal poop, it’s distanced from us, and we aren’t the ones responsible for its existence, so there isn’t that feeling of shame and discomfort.
Another potential reason for the difference in how we handle animal waste is that it is an established thing, much like the shame associated with our own waste, so it feels normal to be grossed out by handling our own shit, but when it comes to scooping the cat litter or cleaning a guinea pig cage, it’s relatively tolerable.
Personally I never thought much about shit. Like most people, I thought it was mostly just something that everyone does and that it was a bit unsanitary. However, I was always curious about how humans were able to turn the food we eat into something so unrecognizable and smelly. I have also wondered why we did not use human excrement as a fertilizer on a mass scale which I got my answer to in Gerling’s reading.
When I read Gerling’s excerpt from Food, Culture, & Society I immediately thought of two scenes from the movie The Help. In one scene, the white employer of a black housekeeper argues that “colored” help should use a separate bathroom outside of the house because “they carry different diseases than we do” and it’s unsanitary (The Help). In a subsequent scene, the same housekeeper uses the employer’s bathroom instead of the outside one, and the employer, in a fit of rage, fires the housekeeper on the spot.This is ironic because her help is allowed to take care of their children, cook for them (eating food touched by their hands), and clean her house. Yet shitting in their bathroom was deemed unsanitary? I guess this was just a step too far, given feces I would say is considered the most unsanitary bodily function. I know this is a movie and not real life, but I still find it interesting that they decided to keep this in the final cut of the movie, even if discriminatory practices like this did not happen it still stands out. This then leads me to think segregated bathrooms in the era of Jim Crow laws where blacks and whites could not share the same bathroom, which I thought, up until recently, was just because everything was separated by race, but I am now realizing the introduction of the indoor toilet and plumbing have more significant historical roots.
One of the constant struggles of Pedal People work is finding a place to pee. This is an issue for waste haulers and delivery drivers more broadly, but it’s especially bad with bicycle-based hauling, because of all the water one has to consistently drink to remain hydrated. Sometimes one is working near downtown where there are a few options, but what can be done if one is in a residential area all day? Covid made this situation much worse. We used to be able to go at the transfer stations (where we haul most of the waste), but both of these stopped allowing outsiders in the buildings, and probably never will again. We’ve made a list of places throughout town where one can easily access a bathroom (without having to purchase something, asking for a key, etc), but it shouldn’t be this difficult! Some of the options on that list include relatively secluded areas off of the bike path where one can pee in the woods. In one of my routes without such an area, I’ve taken to using a customer’s trash/storage shed to seclude myself while I try to quickly pee in a Gatorade bottle I bring with me. But options like this are of course even more challenging for those who have… different physiological configurations.
Probably zero sugar, but not yellow Gatorade!
From this, we can see my extreme conditioning to only pee in ‘appropriate’ spaces. Like most people, I’ve had years of training in my formative years about this, which is now wrapped up into senses of shame and dignity. But this goes beyond just worrying what other people will think about my pissing location. This conditioning is so deep it affects me at a physical level. As in, even if I decided I don’t really care if I’m seen, I don’t think I’d be able to just pee into a sewer, or even into a bottle while in a more public area. I’d simply be physically unable to do so.
It’s like I’ve been set up with an impossible situation. I’ve been conditioned to only pee in these socially acceptable locations. Yet not enough of these locations exist. What am I supposed to do? I’m realizing as I write this how much mental energy I use every day about worrying when/where to pee.
And these ‘appropriate’ places are all about moving my fluids away as quickly and seamlessly as possible. The infrastructures make my pee waste, when scientists are finally ‘rediscovering’ the uses of urine as an effective fertilizer. The ‘responsible’ thing to do is literally piss this resource down the drain.
Most of the rural communes I lived at and visited had standard toilets, connected to a treatment plant or septic system. Some had composting toilets, whose droppings were usually used for non-agriculture plants, like the flower gardens. My experiences with these lead me to believe that modern toilets don’t actually save that much time and effort, and really are just a huge waste of water. Shoveling out the decomposed poop every several months wasn’t much different than shoveling soil: it had already decomposed, and didn’t smell at all. And if one didn’t want to do even that minimal labor, there are ways around that. The Possibility Alliance essentially built a small building with a toilet over a hole, and when it became full, they just moved the building, covered the poop hole with soil, let it decompose for a few years, and then planted a tree on it. These composting toilets were usually somewhat out of the way from residences, in standalone buildings, due to the varying levels of legality. (Like Pierre Leroux found in 1850s London, the State still doesn’t want us to use our shit as a resource.) But then one had to make the decision of using the convenient indoor toilets versus the slightly inconvenient outdoor ones, an easy choice in the winter.
Maybe I’ll ask the free garden I often bike by if they would consider making a composting toilet for the public. Then I could deal with a few of my neuroses in one sitting.
What do your everyday behaviors around shit reveal about our culture, history, or power relations, broadly defined? You can use the main themes of the readings as a starting point if you wish, such as Gerling’s connections with indoor plumbing and colonialism and racial hierarchies, or Simmons’ resurfacing of utopian socialist thought from 19th century French theorists who saw shit as a resource, but feel free to excrete other shitty connections if you feel so moved.
In my few experiences with shit, two themes stand prominent for me: it is unsanitary and it is taboo. The unsanitary part makes sense to me. Just like any other bodily fluids, feces can carry disease and plague, because it is literally our bodies excreting the resources we don’t need and/or want. History is nothing short of examples of collapse due to mishandling of bodily produced waste (see Medieval Europe). The ladder theme, though, is very strange to me. I’m sure most are familiar with the children’s book Everyone Poops. As the Wikipedia page describes, “The book tells children that all animals defecate and that they have always done so. The book is intended to relieve shame and embarrassment around the act of defecating by explaining to children that it is a natural part of life.” Great! Except, why is there shame and embarrassment surrounding the act of defecating if it is a natural part of life? Where are these children getting the idea that poo is taboo? I believe the answer lies in a cultural understanding of privacy. In our historically unsanitary shit practices, relieving oneself was not done behind a closed door where no one else could see you, it was generally done as bathing was – in the group bathhouse, where everyone else in the family was also doing it. At some point in our refining of these practices to make them more sanitary, it became a more “private” event, potentially in an effort to dissuade the cross-contamination from the diseases that lurk within feces. Additionally, we have societally decided that the parts which produce these acts should be covered up at all times publicly. This is partially due to the sexual nature of the nether regions, but it also reinforces the idea that what goes on down there is taboo.
What do your everyday behaviors around shit reveal about our culture, history, or power relations, broadly defined? You can use the main themes of the readings as a starting point if you wish, such as Gerling’s connections with indoor plumbing and colonialism and racial hierarchies, or Simmons’ resurfacing of utopian socialist thought from 19th century French theorists who saw shit as a resource, but feel free to excrete other shitty connections if you feel so moved.
Readings from this week:
Pliny, The Natural History, Book XXVIII, Chapters 13, 18.
Gerling, Daniel Max. “Excrementalisms: Revaluing What We Have Only Ever Known as Waste.” Food, Culture & Society 22, no. 5 (2019): 622–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2019.1638126.
Simmons, Dana. “Waste Not, Want Not: Excrement and Economy in Nineteenth-Century France.” Representations 96, no. 1 (November 1, 2006): 73–98. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2006.96.1.73.
