Fear of Feces

Why the avoidance is normal and measurable

Wikipedia's article puts the human attitude to faeces and defecation down to cultural taboo, and then notes what happens outside the species. Grazing herbivores including cows, sheep, horses and reindeer avoid faeces when feeding, and primates prefer to forage away from contaminated ground. The aversion is believed to be a strategy for avoiding infection.

The best measurement of that comes from a study published in the journal Oikos in December 2017, which monitored raccoon latrines with wildlife cameras. Latrines are a useful test site because they concentrate two things at once, seeds worth eating and the eggs of a pathogenic parasite, so an animal approaching one is trading a meal against an infection.

Over forty potentially susceptible vertebrate species were recorded at the latrines and in the surrounding habitat, and the pattern followed susceptibility rather than squeamishness. Raccoons and rats, which tolerate the parasite, were significantly attracted to the sites. Birds and small mammals, which do not, avoided them. The authors argue that parasites can produce a landscape of fear in the way predators do.

That is a fear of faeces with a dose-response curve, and it belongs to the animals for whom the risk is real.

What the human record says

Very little, and what there is comes from the wrong direction. The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias defines coprophobia as fear or revulsion of faeces or dirt, records scatophobia and koprophobia as alternative spellings, and offers one explanation: that the phobia is interpreted psychoanalytically as a defence against anal erotism, or coprophilia. That reading makes the aversion a disguised version of its opposite, and it does not account for the cows.

A 1997 book on constipation and ano-rectal insufficiency approaches it historically instead, suggesting that human coprophobia developed gradually and was reflected first in a rising demand for privacy while defecating. That is a claim about culture and it is the only developmental account in the sources.

Where the line would have to be drawn

A fear shared with most of the animal kingdom and with almost every human being is not a phobia. What would make it one is disproportion, and the sources here do not describe the point at which the ordinary aversion becomes a disorder. In practice such a presentation would be assessed as a contamination fear and filed with obsessive-compulsive disorder or with mysophobia, and the word coprophobia would not be written down.

The catalogue records the term because it is real vocabulary with real observations behind it, and records that the observations are almost all zoological.

Where the word actually turns up

Coprophobia turns up in one place reliably, which is lists. A horror anthology released in 2018 built fourteen short segments around named phobias and used it as one of them, alongside fears of:

• hair
• young girls
• germs
• being lost
• celestial objects
• cooking
• dreams That is the register the word lives in: it is more useful as a title than as a diagnosis.