vidarh

Pica is eating things that are not food, but as pointed out in the article I linked, eating dog poo is providing a significant source of nutrition for foxes. In those circumstances, it by definition is not pica.

Pet dogs also eat poo on occasion, also without any underlying problem, so I really don't think there's any reason to think that far less domesticated species where it is well established would just stop. I'm sure you can reduce it, especially if it has a nicer food source, but still, an animal with far less history of domestication seems like a recipe for amplification of all the potential issues you don't want to deal with.

To the "they smell bad" bit, I'll add two things:

1. I have pictures (maybe I'll post some, despite the ick factor) where this fox laid down to sleep right next to a pillow it had shit all over. And we're not talking pebbles, we're talking the runs and it was a nightmare to clean. It was tempting to burn the thing.... I also have to clean massive piles of fox poop off the decking on a regular basis.

2. There is this: Dog poo forms a significant part of foxes' diet

Of course, one captive-bred will likely be better, but I absolutely agree with you they won't make great pets.

They are cute, but frankly, that is just about sufficient to let me tolerate them sleeping in the gazebo and thoroughly washing stuff afterward, but not nearly sufficient to make me consider one as a pet.

This is basically the concept of a Webring, and used to be big. Some were fixed (as in the path through the ring was always the same), but some were more flexible or random or semi-random.

A decentralised approach would be new, and not necessarily too hard since the dataset for each ring would be small, so each member could just store all or a subset of the entries in their ring and submit updates to their "neighbours" in the ring that'd eventually spread out to everyone. The challenge is moderation - you'll still end up with some entities that have a privileged position to weed out bad entries, because the appeal was always to a large extent to make discovery "someone else's problem" and the moment you let someone put links on your site someone will try to abuse it.