Eat up if you want to be big and strong blickwinkel / Alamy Stock Photo

Rabbits have a taste for their own faeces – and now we know why. The small mammals produce both soft and hard faeces, and will routinely eat the soft ones. It turns out that eating soft faeces helps the rabbits digest their food and gain weight at a healthy rate.

To test what effect a faeces-containing diet has on rabbits, Ming Li at the Henan Agricultural University in China and his team raised two groups of New Zealand rabbits. Some were allowed to eat their …