The accumulation of large amounts of dung from captive herbivorous wildlife can easily cause environmental pollution and its treatment is time-consuming. Dung beetles feed on the dung of mammals or use mammalian dung as a place for breeding activities If dung beetles can be screened and used to treat the dung of herbivorous wildlife, it will undoubtedly have certain application value. Fresh dung samples of three species of captive herbivorous wild mammals (namely, Elephas maximus, Dama dama and Giraffa camelopardalis) from Nanjing Hongshan Forest Zoo were used as bait in this study from August, 2019 to September, 2019. The replacement and placement trap methods during the two stages of the experiment were used in Nanjing Zijin mountain to investigate the attraction of dung to dung beetles. One-way ANOVA was used to test the trapping quantity of dung beetles. The results showed that a total of 4 597 dung beetles were recorded in the first stage, belonging to 7 species, 5 genera and 1 family. During the first stage, Onthophagus sinicus (48.79%) and Caccobius brevis (30.95%) were the dominant species (Table 1). In the second stage, 3 512 dung beetles were recorded, belonging to 7 species, 5 genera and 1 family (Fig. 2). Dung beetles showed polyphagous characteristics to the dung of three species of wild mammals and the effective time periods of feeding activities in all samples of dung were mainly concentrated in 1﹣2 d, which occupied a short time. There was almost no dung beetles found in the dung on the 7th day (Fig. 1, 3). Diversity index pattern of dung beetle community shows that Shannon-Wiener index and Pielou index were relatively higher in E. maximus dung (Fig. 4). The study shows that the dung of three species of herbivorous wild mammals in captivity from zoo have great attraction to dung beetles and further study is needed on the treatment effect on dung by dung beetles.