Bones

Hi all,

I am wanting some advice on giving Roxy raw bones. Last time I got one from our local butchers I couldn't bring myself to give her it. As it didn't smell appealing to me at all.

What type of bones should I be asking for from the butchers?

Do I need to clean any old fat and flesh of them ?

Do they need washing or freezing to kill any bugs ?

Will she eat the bone itself ?

I have often heard chicken necks mentioned, where can these be bought from.

Any help and advice would be great thanks.

My mum used to buy bones from Pets At Home that were already prepared & ready. They stunk! Not to mention her dog used to love nothing more than picking one up & dropping it on the floor causing lots of dents in my parents' expensive wood floor.

My dogs get a variety of raw bones. I buy all of mine from the regular butcher as I don't like that stuff they have at the pet shops. They mainly get chicken necks & wings, but also get lamb shanks & other bone off-cuts from the butcher. I don't like sharp splintery bones like T-bones, though many people do feed those.

When feeding raw bones, they come under 2 categories:

Raw meaty bones: These are the ones that are soft enough to completely consume & they contain a good degree of meat on them, eg chicken necks & wings

Recreational bones: These are the larger harder bones that get gnawed on all day long, but only a big dog could consume, and they contain little in the way of meat. These are the ones that have the reputation for breaking or wearing down teeth. Typically they'd be things like beef shin bones etc.

Should anything be done with the bones from the butchers or do you just give them straight to your dog ?

Can you get chicken neck and wing bones from a butchers?

You should be able to just feed them straight to her, I used to feed raw chicken wings to my dogs a while back, we had a poultry farmer living 5 miles away and my lot got 1 each as a mid-day snack and adored them! Sadly they have now closed when the farmer retired and the farm was sold off for developing into posh barn conversions!!
I do believe the company AMP started selling them but would need to check into that!

our butchers differ on what bones to give but jadan used to love big raw beef ones. sometimes raw sometimes cooked.i say used to....we accidently clicked on a site one day thinking they sold bones but it turned out to be a vet site showing us disturbing pictures of xrays of dogs with chunks of splintered bones. i am all for letting dogs be dogs and yes in the wild they would forage for these and other unsavoury stuff, but i bet they didnt live very long and have you ever seen a wild healthy dog?. hence now jadan gets other tasty chews. he still gets a stuffed baked bone though as he just licks the inside out and grinds at the bone a bit, then we through it away.

angie said:

sometimes raw sometimes cooked

Click to expand...

Never feed cooked bones. Also if you feed large bones that get left laying around the yard, do go & collect them & throw them in the bin at the end of the day, because over time they dry out in the sun and become as brittle and dangerous as cooked bones.

Most supermarkets sell trays of chicken wings so they are easy to find. Necks are harder to find but some butchers carry them or ethnic butchers/foodstores. In Dublin, I can get necks from two of the larger butchers on Moore Street, the traditional street of butchers and fruit and veg sellers. They sell them primarily for the Chinese and eastern European communities who use them for making stock.

I had a dangerous experience with Jaspar and a raw chicken wing so will not feed these anymore unless cut into three pieces. So mainly I do not bother.

Vets I have spoken to do occasionally report problems with eating raw bones as well as cooked so I do think anyone feeding raw bones needs to weigh up their own comfort level with them -- eg health benefits vs possible risks. For my dogs, I have seen the risk side outweigh the benefit for small bones so I have altered my own use of raw meaty bones for this reason. I rarely give necks anymore as I have seen the dogs pass stools with some blood and sharp bone fragments. I do like pieces of marrow bone for gnawing but have yet to find a good butchers who will do these for me.

This is an interesting and informative read for anyone feeding bones -- comments from caretakers of wolves and other wild canids at a number of leading North American/UK sanctuaries on what they see when wolves are given bone. They almost to a person feel small bones are only safe when the canid ingests the full animals -- eg hide and hair. They seem to mostly feel regular large bones are psychologically, but not particularly nutritionally, valuable. Many own dogs and comment that they give large bones to their dogs but would never feed smaller meaty bones as they feel they are dangerous for dogs without the hide/hair.

http://www.thepetcenter.com/imtop/wolfexrep.html

So there are lots of perspectives on bones! I know many feed raw bones like wings and necks for years without problems. But I have seen the risk side of this firsthand and feel I could easily have lost a dog as a result, so my own choice is to generally avoid the RMBs.

I won't do wings or necks because Shelby is such a snarfer. This girl just does not chew and I'm scared to death of her choking. They do enjoy marrow bones though. Whole Foods carries them. I put their snoods on them, put a towel down in their crates and crate them up. They really enjoy them and don't eat the bones. These are the only ones I feel safe with right now.

I think i've said before that I don't like the idea of raw or bone, but that's my oinion. However, as Izzy didn't like having his teeth cleaned and Monty swallows smallish chews whole, making the special dental ones useless, I asked, at the vets, what to use and was advised, by the receptionist, to get sterile filled bones from Pets at Home.

Both dogs enjoyed the filling, but Izzy went off the bone as soon as it was empty and Monty had started biting off some very sharp looking pieces, so in the bin went the bones. it was several days before I found what they had done to Izzy, They had sheared off the enamel from the inner surfaces of his canines. It was the bones, as he never picked up stones or any other rubbish. Izzy never seemed to have any pain from the damaged teeth, but his canines were, from then, very sharp, so rather dangerous.

Bones were discussed, on Dogpages, this week , and another person mentioned that they noticed that they could splinter into sharp bits too.

Barbara - I, too, used to give them those sterile bones and I put peanut butter in them...until we had a veterainary dentist speak at our club and show us what those bones to the teeth. Scared me straight off of them.