Poultry Bones - Page 3

Molly wrote: [cooked bone] cracks and breaks and can have shards and fragments that can puncture going down or be lodged in the gut, cause damage.  COOKED and therefore BRITTLE chicken bones should never be fed to animals.  Very dangerous.  But RAW chicken bones are not brittle, the dogs can crunch them up, they don't fracture when they chew them, they grind up

Frankly, Molly, I just cannot see the difference here. The raw bones DO break, the dog DOES 'grind them up.' I've worked enoungh with (UNCOOKED) skeletons of birds to know those bones DO have sharp edges when they break. Even if they do get digested when swallowed, the fragments still could cause damage going down.  It seems logical to ME that the softer cooked bones would be more easily ground up and digested than the tougher, more flexible raw bones. (Bird bones are designed to bend and flex a certain amount, especially wing bones.)

Sunsilver, the difference is very clear in your dog.  Love the coat change and the weight loss!  As to the sharp bone, I know Renji has eaten knife-sharp pork bones (needle-like, sharp edges, etc).  Apparently it doesn't phase him.  Dogs have very strong digestive acids and while I'm not knocking that a bone can go down wrong, if animals died all the time from sharp bones then evolution would have ensured different means of handling animal carcasses as food.  I've watched him on chicken quarters, fully frozen ones even, and he manages them no problem.  He'll "disassemble" the part into a few smaller parts and will gulp these, but this is what carnivores are designed to do the world over- rip the critter apart just enough to swallow the pieces comfortably and quickly.  You won't see any wild canid leisurely masticating over light conversation.  He'll typically take apart the quarter at the joint, split the thigh part in half or so while crunching the bone (presumably just to break it up but not necessarily completely separate it), then he'll crush the drumstick a little and more or less gulp that down.  He comes out of mealtime looking like a bloated whale but it works very well for him.  He eats a lot for his size.  I believe the point with the dog is to just get chunks of bone and flesh into a more manageable size to be swallowed where the gut does the rest with its powerful acids.  This is likely why Renji can take what I see are huge pieces of chicken and put them out as bone meal mixed with compact fecal matter.  But like all food, things can go wrong.  Many people have died eating, after they ate, or due to what was eaten, so eating as a general rule isn't as safe as we'd like to think.  It's a matter of what risk you want to accept (raw bones) and what you are not willing to accept (sticking with kibble). 

The number one rule amongst raw feeders is NO COOKED BONES.  Given the nature of experimentation with diets when feeding raw, I'm sure some would have been feeding cooked bones by now.  The only cooked bones I know are okay to feed are those in the little cans of fish.

I know very well the reason why dogs are not allowed to chew on cooked beef bones, for example. It's because they ARE easier to splinter, and chew chunks off of. But the whole idea behind not giving cooked bones is that you do not WANT the dog to eat the bone, you just want him to CHEW on it, and get whatever meat is still attached to it.

So, as near as I can tell there is nothing but anecdotal evidence and hearsay to prove that cooked poultry bones are bad for dogs, while raw ones are okay.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to remain skeptical of this until someone comes up with better evidence.

DEvolved or Evolved?  What assumption?  Scientific fact that dogs were bred down from wolves.  Current taxonomy classifies the domestic canine as Canis lupus familiaris.  Yes, our dog is a wolf, but really is a subspecies of wolf.  The beauty of taxonomy though is what is right today may be wrong tomorrow, but currently the dog is defined as merely a wolf subspecies, not a separate species.  You take issue with that, go talk to the Department of Taxonomy.

Originally posted by Sunsilver:

I took a graduate level course in faunal archaeo-osteology, which looked at the way native North Americans used animal bones for food, decoration and tools. Bird bones are hollow inside. They are easy to crush and splinter. When you break them, you get sharp edges. They make great awls and needles for puncturing leather. Might they not also puncture a dog's gut?

Take your research a bit further. 

Bone is living tissue and "fowl" bones contain moisture and some even a marrow-type product similar to the bones of other animals.  As a result of the moisture in the raw bone the bone is "softer" and more "pliable" - softer to chew and softer to digest.  Without moisture (removed during the cooking process and found at the bottom of the pan) the bone is "dry" and "brittle" and will sharply splinter as a result of either a bite or a sharp knock with a hammer.  Dry, brittle, (cooked) bones will splinter and then pulverize to a dry powder in a mortar and pestal, leaving no residue.  A raw, moisture-laden bone will not.  A dog's digestive system is strong, but it's not a mortar and pestal.  It is a moist environment full of the digestive enzymes that are part of it.  

The heating process changes the composition of the bone.  The raw bone is moist and moves along through the digestion process allowing the digestive juices to work as it goes.  The cooked bone is dry and absorbs the moisture in the digestive tract as the hard, pourous "sponge" that it is and splintered pieces can puncture the gut because the moisture in the gut has been absorbed by the bone and the drier gut doesn't allow for smooth movement and digestion.  (I'm sure there have been better explanations than that in the last 20 years, but that's the explanation I can give now.  I don't keep up on all the "technical" and "scientific" verbage - I recall what I learned and use what works for the dogs.)

Archeo-osteology is just that.  Archeological.  Those bones have been dead and dried for many, many years and not just "dried" for the few minutes as a result of and after cooking.  And there's really no way of knowing how long the bone was "dried" further before being shaped for use as described.  

Take and have analyzed in the lab the raw bone (make sure you leave the meat on for them to remove) and the cooked bone (with or without the meat as you would feed it to the dog).  That will answer those questions.  (I believe Monica Segal did that herself and obtained the nutritional values as well. www.monicasegal.com/ )  I'm sure that will help.

FWIW, I've been feeding raw for over 20 years.  The primary in the diet was fowl - whether it was chicken, quail, guinea hens, duck, turkey - and never an issue.  Giza was eating chicken wings, legs and thighs from the time I brought her home at about 11 weeks.  She also eats backs (with the hollow rib bones) and breasts with rib bones.  Again, never a problem.

She does chew.  Chewing can be encouraged by feeding raw and/or hand-feeding to force the issue until they learn to slow down and do it themselves, so to speak, whether thawed or hand-fed.  And they are more "voracious" eaters when switching from kibble to real food.  It's about the same enthusiasm as you'd show eating a saltine cracker vs. a prime rib dinner having been without food for X hours. 

Does that make any sense or have I made it clear as mud?

I was paranoid about feeding my GSD chicken bones took the meat off the bones and fed it to him that way.    But about a month ago I took some advice on this forum fed him the raw chicken bone and all.  So for a month now that is the way I have fed him.  At first I watched him chew everything but now it's the first thing he goes for.   So far so good.  I'll keep feeding him the raw chicken bone and all because he really enjoys it. 

Another important thing to remember - the stool coming out should not be crumbly/powdery/white/dry in appearance.  That's an indication of too much bone in the diet and the next step is constipation.  (100% canned, pure pumpkin x's a few spoonfuls will help that).  Decrease the amount of bone or increase the amount of muscle meat.  (It's ok if it dries and turns white and disintegrates after being in the yard for a day or two, but not ok if it's being expelled that way.)

Too much meat without the bone will cause diahhrea.  (Pumpkin, wonderful stuff that it is, will also help that.)  By "pumpkin" I mean the 100% pure canned pumpkin and not the pie mix.  The pie mix contains spices.  You don't want that.

You want to see stools that are solid, compact, well-formed, moist in appearance but not soft/runny, not crumbly, and the color of shades of brown, for lack of a better description.  (That will change when you feed green tripe.  Don't sweat the "green".  ). 

A chicken leg quarter, skin on, is about as close to the perfect balance as it comes as far as the ideal ratio of RMB's to MM.  Depending on the size of the quarter you still might need to add a bit of muscle meat to prevent the dry stool.

Also, variety is key for good nutrition.  Red meats contain different vitamins, et al. than poultry, and so on.  Beef rib bones, rabbit, lamb and lamb rib and neck bones, (some use pork neck bones and rib bones), turkey, beef heart for muscle meat; liver, kidney, brains, lungs, trachea for the organ meat, whole fish (frozen for two weeks to kill any possibly parasites), venison, - you get the idea.  The bones that should not be used are the weight-bearing bones of large animals (over 500 lbs. approximately).  Those bones should not be part of the diet but can be used (under supervision) as recreational chewing bones.  They're too hard to be used as part of the diet.

Sunsilver, there's risk in kibble and there's risk in raw.  If you do your homework with raw you can minimize the risk.  You can't minimize the risk with kibble because you don't control what's going in.  You do control that with raw.

Re:  Chewing

Sorry, Sunsilver.  I should have said:

Chewing can be encouraged by feeding raw frozen and/or hand-feeding to force the issue until they learn to slow down and do it themselves, so to speak, whether thawed or hand-fed

Sorry about that.

Excellent post(s) FionaDunne

excellent post, raw bones ok cooked will splinter,