One of the animals sometimes seen at night is the scrub hare. They eat grass, shrub stems and roots and their feeding behaviour has another unusual aspect – they perform coprophagia which refers to the habit of animals eating their own dung or the dung of other animals. In this case they eat their own dung. They have two distinct types of faecal pellets, one hard and produced in the main stream of the digestive tract. These pellets are round and yellow in colour. The other type, less frequently produced, is dark in colour and from the cecum and contains bacteria necessary for the fermentation of food in the fundus and stomach. This type of dropping is covered in a gelatinous layer and it is these droppings they will consume again to extract as much nutrients out of their food as possible.
