system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Serious question: when did pooping become taboo?

Yes, some may consider this puerile, but I'm genuinely curious.  Animals poop all the time with no regard for decorum. Yet we, as a species, have developed huge, special boxes so that we may poop privately.  There are unspoken rules in bathrooms (avoid eye contact, etc) that reinforce the notion that pooping should be a very private function.  

We avoid talking about it in 'proper' settings and yet many of us joke about it in more informal settings.  It's considered an offensive (or at least inappropriate) topic by many and yet it's one of the very few things that literally every human on the planet has in common with one another.

I believe every (or nearly every, at least) culture has the same basic privacy standards around pooping, so it doesn't appear to be culturally influenced, but rather something more endemic to human nature.

So -- why are we so uptight about pooping when all other living organisms on the planet seem to not give a rip?  Were we always this way?
gpt
I Could point you towards Norbert Elias's *The History of Manners (The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1)* in wich he does, on a typical eliasian faishon, a sociogenetic analysis of the Manners on French and German society.

Tracing black to the development of the idea of *kultur* and *civilizacion* right at the begginning of the modern era, he also finds where our actual "good manners" come from. By developing a society where the bonds of interdependence are much tighter and because of that, the levels of scrutiny the higher strata of society puts between themselves are much higher, starting by their manners, shitting included, of course.

He explicitly says in the book that the reacionário of disgust these societies developed to shitting comes from that era where "the civilizing process" was  pressed against the top layer of society, and adopted by the classes below them in an effort to emulate their practices, hence their power.