In a Wolf's Stomach

Now, for those of you who state with confidence that "Wolves in the wild eat bones all the time; so it must be OK for dogs to do the same", I would ask you this... How many times have you even seen a healthy wolf? How can you state with authority that wolves are NOT occasionally harmed by a bone splinter?  I can tell you this: If a wolf unluckily happens to become disabled by intestinal bone fragments such as the dogs in these examples were, the wolf's cousins would dispatch the sick wolf in moments "...and unto dust thou shalt return".  Hardly anyone ever sees even a healthy wolf, how much more unlikely would it be to happen upon a sick wolf when being a "sick wolf" is equivalent to a swift death sentence! 

The thing about wolves never being harmed by a bone is poppycock. Hogwash. BS. What's to say that us as humans never choke on the occasional hotdog or piece of broccoli and comes out alive? How many wild animals have you seen that are healthy? Even deers and birds are malnurished, because they don't have a set feeding schedule and *cough* unhealthy sterile homes to kill off all the *cough again, sorry* nasty trich and salmonella from the spleens and hearts that my dogs consume on a daily basis. I live and breath feeding a prey model diet like my mom. We recently aqcuired a Border collie puppy and all that she's been eating is kibble and chicken feet. I admit that it's only been a few days, but if bones were so harmful to a dog, shouldn't something bad have happened yet? We have a two and a half year old Belgian Malinois who eats bones, skin, liver, kidney, heart and other organs EVERY day, and he hasn't dropped down dead. The only ailments he's ever had was demodectic mange when we bought him and mild poisoning when he drank some floor cleaner.

Another point:

This produced a flurry of posts stating that the only dogs that did that were previous kibble feeders.They insisted any dogs that were raised from puppyhood on raw would never touch the stomach

Not true. Knox (our mal) eats green tripe ALL the time. He only was fed kibble (Solid Gold Wolf Cub) for about a month, before mom switched him to raw. When we were at the grocerie store one day, they were selling whole pig heads, just freshly sliced off. Still had the tongue brain and everything. We would give it to Knox and it took him about a week to finish it, but he ate every last nasty bone fragment.

Wow, that felt good! I had a long day and nothing calms me down like a nice debate!


Haleigh and Joy

These large stomachs also have an ability to hold onto a bone until it is wrapped in the hide they bit off with it. Once wrapped, it passes, hardly providing benefit, just a hazard of a wolf's life.

ORIGINAL: ron2
 

Because they often eat the entire animal that they kill, they ingest a lot of hair. Towards the final defecations involving the same kill, hair can be seen in the feces actually wrapped tightly around any bones that are passed through. This seems to protect the organs/passageways as the bones are eliminated.

ORIGINAL: jessies_mom

I repeat, I read Ron's links and the "wrapping in hide" thing is never mentioned. No surprise. This, of course would mean the skin (hide) is not digestible which I have never seen even implied by any source.

I imagine the info in the first link is still relevant but it is from a 1999 message thread.

One thing to remember here- a normal raw fed dogs stomach is never going to be full of bones as shown in the x-ray of the dog that fed on the deer.A proper raw diet consists of around 10-15 % bone, and that is fed as bone covered with meat. No bare bones. Mattie eats around 1 and 3/4 lbs of meat/bones/organs per day, and only 3-4 oz of that is bone.There's a lot of meat cushioning the small amount of bone. She's eaten rabbit, chicken, turkey, lamb, pheasant, quail and pork bones. Never had a bone show up in her stool. She's had whole rabbit with the fur, fur comes out, still no bone. Apparently, she is digesting and utilizing the bones.
The form letter that Dunn sent out makes it sound as if he's asking about large bare bones, and many of the replies sound like they're talking about bare bones also.Good raw feeders avoid bare bones like the plague, and they call beef knuckle bones 'wreck' bones instead of rec bones for a reason.

I repeat, I read Ron's links and the "wrapping in hide" thing is never mentioned. No surprise. This, of course would mean the skin (hide) is not digestible which I have never seen even implied by any source

 
   The info I linked and quoted is on the same site that Ron linked, but a different page. As I said twice, I have seen coyote scat which consisted of bones wrapped in hair; it looks like a hairy stick. To be honest, this may not be a special adaptation; it could be that the hide and bone are the last things to be digested and the hide wraps around the bone as they make their way through the intestines.

it could be that the hide and bone are the last things to be digested

ORIGINAL: jessies_mom

I am unable to find any reference to hide (skin) anywhere in any of the links.  Fur ain't hide.  Hide is animal  skin exclusive of fur.  It is digested.  Fur is not.
 
What Ron described would require magic fingers in a wolf's belly, sifting through stomach contents and grabbing bone.  While holding the bone then grabbing apparently undigestible skin and wrapping the bone with it before releasing it to pass undigested through the rest of the GI tract.
 
Just because poop appears to have bone wrapped in fur (not skin) does not mean it was wrapped in fur for much time prior to "the squeeze".  Does human poop look the same as stomach contents?

From observing my own dogs eating a carcass, I've noticed that it's not so much that the stomach is "holding on to the bone" (it does not, smaller bone, ie, crunchable size, is broken down in the stomach - not digested, that happens in the small intestine - at a tremendous rate, as I have seen confirmed with x-rays taken only a couple hours after a meal). Goodies like the offal are consumed, along with (for my guys) either the head for a small animal, feet for a bird, or neck meat (which contains a good bit of gristle and whatnot) for a ruminant or pig. The offal is cleaned up and some of the prime bits start getting worked on. Dogs like shoulder best, apparently. I split a carcass in quarters, roughly, so they work up the spine - but on the butt they rip into the hock first and move up to the loin. They love ears and will stop to snack on them even before the prime bits are gone. On a large beast they pull back the skin, though they nibble a little on it as they go. Eventually they will have a bony carcass with a good bit of skin. The skull has already been slurped clean of brain, but at this point they pull all the rest of the tissue off (yeah, gross) and quickly have the skull down to bare bone, including cracking the jaw in two to get the ligament and muscle that holds the two mandibles in place. Many smaller bones are consumed with the prime bits - ribs, spine, tail, hocks, shoulder. Now the dog goes to work on the bigger bones, cracking them and slurping out the marrow. Skin, feathers, and even loose hair gets consumed at a great rate at this time. I think they have a desire to balance the richness of the marrow with the trashiness of the hide and hair (or feathers). There's also a lot of bits where the skin is just impossible to remove without opposable thumbs.

Skin is digested. I've fed hides with huge amounts of wool to my guard dogs, just for a treat when I'm taking care of a cull or one we've lost. They won't eat sheep parts but they will eat the hides. What comes out the other end is nothing but a surprisingly small amount of wool. They would be well and truly dead by now if they were incapable of digesting that hide.

Possibly dogs that aren't used to a natural diet might have trouble digesting raw hide (true raw hide, not the cured stuff in chewies). But I doubt it - the consistency is as different, or more so, from the store bought things, as baked bone is from raw bone.

So, in regards to their stool, you'll see softer stools at first, then firmer as they are consuming meals more balanced between straight meat and bone, with little bits of softer extremities like ear, tail, and face. Then you'll see very firm stools full of hair/wool/feathers.

My dogs rarely get the opportunity to consume bone heavy enough to be indigestible - they are offered other food at that point and so aren't desperate enough to do that. But I could see that weight bearing bones would be getting consumed with the last of the hair, if they were in the wild and had no choice but to eat those bones, too.

There's a huge difference between weight bearing bones and the other crunchable bones. I've had the opportunity on three different occaisions to see pork neck bones and lamb hocks on x-rays a mere two hours or less after a meal. One time, the dog had eaten a pork neck bone about an hour before and it showed up in the stomach as a rounded bit about the size of a woman's pinkie nail. The other two times, there was nothing to be seen. The reason these dogs were being x-rayed so soon after meals, by the way, was because of farm accidents. [&:] It was a unique opportunity for my vet to see that I really wasn't killing my dogs with my feeding regime and she now recommends raw bones at least to clean teeth.

Hmm, sorry, way more than you wanted to know about raw feeding. By the way, smaller animals get eaten in one sitting so none of this applies. And my guard dogs can easily eat 20 pounds of raw meat in one meal so I don't know what the difference is between their stomach and a wolf's. Ben is half the size of a timber wolf and can easily eat 14 pound of meat, though he doesnt eat again the next day, and very lightly the day after, lol!

I am unable to find any reference to hide (skin) anywhere in any of the links. Fur ain't hide. Hide is animal skin exclusive of fur. It is digested. Fur is not

 
At first, I thought you were being smart alecky and I was going to be smart aleck in return but I thought perhaps your question was in earnest.
 
And now I see that you are interested in trying trip the whole thing over semantics. I suppose you honestly think you accomplished some great debating point trying to differentiate between fur and hide.
 
Ooooh, impressive.
 
It wouldn't matter if an actual expert came right to you and told you these things, etc. It doesn't fit your paradigm, so it can't be.
 
And I was a fool for answering your questions. Burn me once, shame on you. And there won't be a second time.
 

And now I see that you are interested in trying trip the whole thing over semantics.

ORIGINAL: ron2

The difference between skin and hide in this context would be properly characterized as semantic.  The difference between fur and hide is the same as the diffence between skin and feathers.  It is not semantic but quite significant.
 

It should be noted that gray wolves have bigger teeth than dogs do, have a different coronoid process in the jaw hinge ability than dogs do, and have stomachs that can hold up to 20 lbs of food. These large stomachs also have an ability to hold onto a bone until it is wrapped in the hide they bit off with it. Once wrapped, it passes, hardly providing benefit, just a hazard of a wolf's life. Dog stomachs do not have this ability

ORIGINAL: ron2
 
This post states that wolves eating habits, capacity and digestion is quite different from domestic dogs while Becca's recent post completely refutes, as a first hand account, your "magic fingered hide wrapping belly" that keeps bone from being broken down and especially large belly contention.  And the tone of your most recent post ...
 
Why should anyone here expect to make wild claims without being questioned?

Why should anyone here expect to make wild claims without being questioned

 
These "wild claims" are not mine. What I did was state, in my words, is what I have read from some of these sites. These are statements from researchers and scientists and you haven't actually disproved the point of those statements. You are merely taking exception to my posts. This is an opinion forum and you are certainly welcome to have an opinion. You are also welcome to read on your own from something besides just Ian Billinghurst. And Rebecca hasn't had any problems, yet. Nor am I trying to debate on her feeding style, in particular. Among the training set, dogs are seen as distinctly different from wolves, FWIW, if we're going to include opinion.
 
But you saying that I was making wild claims does not change the facts as reported by researchers, either in support or non-committal of problems. That's one reason I think that one link is good, because it's non-biased, without a particular agenda to prove. In there is an embedded link that discusses the exact nutritional benefit, if any, of a bone. You didn't mention that. In the list of comments from wolf caretakers is a mention of even wolves having bloody stools and you didn't address that. In none of them does anyone recommend feeding a dog a bone to be consumed. You didn't address that. Some people's relative success in feeding bones doesn't mean everyone should do it.
 
What you did address was a semantic difference between saying hide and fur. I get that. Hide being the skin, fur being the hair attached to the skin. Either way, both offering a buffering of the bone on it's way through. And, in spite of that, wolves can still get perforations, as signified by the bloody stool. FWIW, Rebecca is the only one I've encountered that specifically feeds her dogs wool from the sheep.
 
Calling some scientific resources "wild claims" doesn't actually disprove them but I think you're more interested in "debating" than actually discussing.
 
I'd just as soon stop now rather than fan flames.
 

My dogs rarely get the opportunity to consume bone heavy enough to be indigestible - they are offered other food at that point and so aren't desperate enough to do that. But I could see that weight bearing bones would be getting consumed with the last of the hair, if they were in the wild and had no choice but to eat those bones, too.

 
  Rebecca, I found your post about how your dogs eat a carcass very interesting. There used to be a raw feeder on this forum who said not to feed weight bearing bones. The bones I saw from coyotes that were wrapped in rabbit fur were leg bones; they were too long to be anything else. The claws that were also in the scat would have come from the rabit's feet.

Here's my first hand account of wolf poop. During my stent as a keeper, I looked after 2 grey wolves. They got a varied diet (where meat was concerned). Some days they got rats and other days they got chickens. During hunting season, deer were plentiful and in the off-season, road-killed deer came in once and a while. They were on a staple diet of kibble that provided the necessary vit/min balance but did get meat daily.
 
One of the jobs as a keeper was to clean up the enclosures of animal parts, enrichment left-overs, and poop/feces/scat (or what ever you want to call it). This was my job for over a year and can tell you without uncertainty that wolves DO deficate hair AND bone, both together and separately. I have seen larger sized fragments, small clusters of fragments, and then the general "boney" (white, hard, powdery) droppings.  Some with fur, some without. I have also seen regular stools that look much like that of a very large dog.
 
So to answer to Ron's "claim" (or the scientific evidence), yes, they do (in my personal experience) eliminate hair with bone and depending on the type of carcass consumed, more or less will be eliminated.
 
This is all just my personal experience with grey wolves []
 
I also feed my beagles whole rabbits (when they are available) and they also eliminate fur, but the bone is usually in the form of hard white stools which are deposited after all the fur has come thru.

ORIGINAL: Cally01

I don't understand what the surprise is, yes, Coyotes, Wolves and other Candids are opportunistic scavengers/hunters.  Scrounging in human dumps as well for food.

One thing I never see the Coyotes around here eat are paws and bird feet...and I've seen them leave the head and intestines on prey animals as well.  In desperate times they will eat just about anything, in a good feeding area sometimes they can afford to be picky like around my area.  Wolves and Coyotes also make up a good percentage of their diet from prey poop as well.  Does that mean I want to add prey poop to my dogs food...not likely.[]

With myself, when I see by products listed on a dog food product I stay away from it because I'm not sure of the quality or "what" the by products may be.  Heart, stomach etc are wonderful...beaks, paws, feathers etc...well, I try to personally avoid.  With myself it's the mystery of what the "by products" may be.  If a food lists that they add liver, heart etc or when I pick up a can of tripe I  "know" what I'm getting.

I wholeheartedly agree!