[USCC] more on dog and cat feces

[Jody.Slagle@ci.austin.tx.us]

I agree with being able to compost dog and cat feces.  Like you pointed out,
the major difficulty is to get the temperature high enough for long enough
in a home compost pile to ensure disease control.  Most of us don't
recommend this practice for home piles because most folks aren't going to
control their piles that carefully.



> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Joe Jenkins [SMTP:mail@jenkinspublishing.com]
> Sent:	Monday, April 30, 2001 12:10 PM
> To:	compost@compostingcouncil.org
> Subject:	[USCC] more on dog and cat feces
> 
> Hi Pat,
> 
> 
> Many people email me asking about composting their cat and dog fecal
> material (and llama, pot-bellied pig, etc. manure). My answer can be
> distilled down to three points:
> 
> 1) *All* discarded organic material should be composted and it's a mistake
> to suggest to people that their organic discards can or should not be
> composted. This is a pet peeve of mine (telling people that dog poop, for
> example, cannot be composted), and I have included a couple of excerpts
> from my book, the Humanure Handbook (which is about composting in general)
> on this issue, below. In fact, each American municipality should be
> collecting the organic material from its residents and composting it for
> them in centralized facilities, as is done in Nova Scotia, but until such
> time as we Americans evolve to that point, people will have to do the
> composting in their own backyards.
> 
> 2) If a person has a thermophilic composting system, probably any animal
> manure can be safely composted in the system. We are all aware of the
> potential health concerns associated with both dog and cat manures, as
> well as human manures, although a thermophilic composting system along
> with a substantial retention time after the thermophilic stage (at least a
> year of retention) should neutralize the pathogens. If in doubt, go to #3.
> 
> 3) A separate compost bin can be established for dog and/or cat feces. It
> can be about the size of a garbage can, and plastic composters are
> available that size. When pet feces are added to the bin, they should be
> covered with a clean organic material to mask odor and aid in composting
> (grass clippings for example, or sawdust, weeds, hay, straw, leaves,
> etc.). Also, food materials should be added to the bin to increase
> moisture and aid in composting (maybe a little soil as well). Finally,
> some water may need to be added from time to time to help with the
> breakdown of the material. When the bin is filled, it should be left to
> age for at least a year, maybe two. In the meantime, a second bin can be
> started. Depending on the size and number of the animals, a bin may take
> years to fill. Once a bin has been filled and adequately aged, the
> material can be used for *horticultural* purposes. It's certainly better
> than sending the stuff to a landfill. I prefer open bottomed composters
> placed on the soil to aid in the migration of soil organisms into the
> composting material, but this is not always an option (for apartment
> dwellers, for example).
> 
> The only research I have read about regarding pet feces was in Alaska with
> sled dog manure, if I remember correctly. Apparently they composted it
> quite successfully using standard backyard procedures.
> 
> 
> 
> Excerpt from the Humanure Handbook, second edition page 72:
> 
> What NOT to compost? You can compost almost anything
> 
>         I get a bit perturbed when I see compost educators telling their
> students that there is a long list of things "NOT to be composted!" This
> prohibition is always presented in such an authoritative and serious
> manner that novice composters begin trembling in their boots at the
> thought of composting any of the banned materials. I can imagine naive
> composters armed with this misinformation carefully segregating their food
> scraps so that, god forbid, the wrong materials don't end up in the
> compost pile. Those banned materials include meat, fish, dairy products,
> butter, bones, cheese, lard, mayonnaise, milk, oils, peanut butter, salad
> dressing, sour cream, weeds with seeds, diseased plants, citrus peels,
> rhubarb leaves, crab grass, pet manures, and, perhaps worst of all: human
> manure. Presumably, one must segregate half-eaten peanut butter sandwiches
> from the compost bucket, or any sandwich with mayonaisse or cheese, or any
> left-over salad with salad dressing, or spoiled milk, or orange peels, all
> of which must go to a landfill and be buried under tons of dirt instead of
> being composted. Luckily, I was never exposed to such instructions, and my
> family has composted EVERY bit of food scrap it has produced, including
> meat, bones, butter, oils, fat, lard, citrus peels, mayonnaise, and
> everything else on the list; we've done this in our backyard for almost 25
> years with never a problem. Why would it work for me and not for anyone
> else? The answer, in a word, if I may hazard a guess, is humanure, another
> forbidden compost material.
>         When compost heats up, much of the organic material is quickly
> degraded. This holds true for oils and fats, or in the words of
> scientists, "Based on evidence on the composting of grease trap wastes,
> lipids [fats] can be utilized rapidly by bacteria, including
> actinomycetes, under thermophilic conditions." 58  The problem with the
> materials on the "banned" list, is that they do require thermophilic
> composting conditions for best results. Otherwise, they can just sit in
> the compost pile and only very slowly decompose. In the meantime, they can
> look very attractive to the wandering dog, cat, raccoon, or rat.
> Ironically, when the forbidden materials, including humanure, are combined
> with other compost ingredients, thermophilic conditions will prevail. When
> humanure and the other controversial organic materials are segregated from
> compost, thermophilic conditions may not occur at all. This is a situation
> that is probably quite common in most backyard compost piles. The solution
> is not to segregate materials from the pile, but to add nitrogen and
> moisture, as is commonly found in manure. 
>         As such, compost educators would provide a better service to their
> students if they told them the truth: almost any organic material will
> compost, rather than give them the false impression that some common food
> materials will not. Granted, some things do not compost very well. Bones
> are one of them, but they do no harm in a compost pile. 
>         Nevertheless, toxic chemicals should be kept out of the backyard
> compost pile. Such chemicals are found, for example, in "pressure treated"
> (i.e. poison-soaked) lumber, which is saturated with cancer-causing
> chemicals (chromated copper arsenate). What not to compost: sawdust from
> pressure treated lumber, which is, unfortunately, a toxic material that is
> more and more available to the average gardener.
> 
> Excerpt from the Humanure Handbook, second edition, page 80:
> 
> Compost recycles pet manures
> 
>         Can you use dog manure in your compost? I can honestly say that
> I've never tried it, as I do not have a source of dog manure for
> experimentation (my dog is a free-roaming outdoor dog, and he leaves his
> scat somewhere out of sight). Numerous people have written to ask me
> whether pet manures can go into their household compost pile, and I have
> responded that I don't know from experience. So I've recommended that pet
> manures be collected in their own separate little compost bins with cover
> materials such as hay, grass clippings, leaves, weeds, or straw, and
> perhaps occasionally watered a bit to provide moisture. A double bin
> system will allow the manures to be collected for quite some time in one
> bin, then aged for quite some time while the second bin is being filled.
> What size bin? About the size of a large garbage can, although a larger
> mass may be necessary in order to spark a thermophilic reaction.
>         On the other hand, this may be entirely too much bother for most
> pet owners who are also composters, and you may just want to put pet and
> human manures into one compost bin. This would certainly be the simpler
> method. The idea of composting dog manure has been endorsed by J. I.
> Rodale in the Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. He states, "Dog manure
> can be used in the compost heap; in fact it is the richest in phosphorous
> if the dogs are fed with proper care and given their share of bones." He
> advises the use of cover materials similar to the ones I mentioned above,
> and recommends that the compost bin be made dog-proof, which can be done
> with straw bales, chicken wire, boards, or fencing.
> 
> 
> 
> Joseph Jenkins
> PO Box 607, Grove City, PA 16127
> 814-786-8209 (phone and fax); 
> 
> A 2001 Three Rivers Environmental Award Finalist 
> in the Public Awareness Category
> 
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> 
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