Chicken bones/ My vet/ a bit of a lecture

Emma is a very high maintenance dog, when it comes to food. She's not even remotely normal. I wouldn't worry about it. I don't, with Teenie. She eats whatever she wants, and does great.

 
Okay I feel a wee bit better....
 
Im kinda freaked over my Scottie Max..which He will get no more... he is a gulper....those kinds of dogs scare me..... my others are such good chewers and take there time.... Max eats like me...LOL IF I get near Mexican food and chip's and salsa..LOOK OUT....GULP GULP GULP....not good.....

I homecook, but no raw meat or bones. I think the vets have seen problems and they don't want more problems. Many dogs do fine I am sure.

I think the vets have seen problems

Exactly...and thats all they see...Problems! They dont see the thousands of dogs who eat rmb's on a daily basis who never have problems.

If i was a behavourist and all i saw were aggressive chihuahua's(sp?),i would'nt automatically assume ALL chi's were aggressive,although others might. I would never have the opportunity to see the many sweet,well behaved chi's because their owners would have no reason to bring them in to me.
I'm no good at analogies,but you get the point []

I would think many vets are like mine and do not like to have to tell someone the bone their gave their dog killed it.  After I saw that lab puppy that died of peritonitis from a from a punctured stomach due to splinter pork chop bone, ...that was all she wrote for me.  I asked my vet not long ago about giving raw bones to clean teeth and he couldn't believe i would eve ask such a question, that i would even consider it.  Said he has had to operate on too many dogs with punctured stomachs to say it was okay.
 
i know i am a chicken about this, but i couldn't live with myself if i caused the death of one of my goldens by giving it raw  bones and expecailly cooked ones--except the ones done for 24 hours in my crock pot.

I have no problem giving my dogs large bones that they can only gnaw on, but I will never actually give them bones to EAT. Any bone can splinter, raw bones are just less likely to do so.

ORIGINAL: terrierlover   ... he is a gulper....those kinds of dogs scare me..... .....

 
Is there any other kind? 

try it yourself-- drop a chicken wing in a vat of acid. The bones go rubbery pretty darn quick. Dogs hold their food in the acid of their stomach for hours.
 
I and many other people have fed thousands of pounds of RAW bones to dogs and had no problems. None. Vets have this problem about distinguishing between raw and cooked bones; they see a lot of dogs come in with problems from being given cooked leftover bones, raiding the garbage and eating leftover cooked bones; and so they say "no bones" without thinking about it.
 
I've never seen bone pieces in my dogs poop. They occasionally vomit up pieces of bone that I guess didn't get "soft" enough in the acid of the stomach to be passed on. And I have a dog who has swallowed entire rabbits and huge pieces of chicken whole.
 
The benefits of feeding raw meaty bones far outweigh the almost non-existant risk. If you don't feed them odds are your dog will have to undergo multiple expensive and dangerous teeth-cleanings during its life.

Some dogs gulp - you have to teach them to behave or they will get into trouble no matter what kind of food they eat. If you feed raw you'll have to hand feed or feed large frozen chunks of food. Maggie was fed whole frozen chickens for a while until she learned to slow down - she's my dog that ate a light bulb apparently just for the fun of it.

On the other hand you'll have the dainty eaters. You have to protect them from your fast eaters if you don't feed in crates. I have two now - Gus, who apparently still can't believe his good fortune over the whole raw food thing, and Ted, who is the world's slowest chewer - he savors every bite of his bones like he's never getting another. I actually think it goes back to when he was a puppy and got a big giant correction for guarding his food from me.

The point to all this is that you are in charge with the raw feeding. You can feed bones, or not, you do the research and see what your dog can handle, you find out the difference between digestible bones and non-digestible bones.

It's not a howling wasteland of ignorance - people have been doing this for a couple generations now - and of course for all the years before commercial dog food existed at all. It's a vet's job to be overcautious, to warn people of the risks and that's fine. There's nothing sinister about that, but I accept that at face value and do what I think is right by my dogs. Science says that bumblebees can't fly, homing pigeons can't orient on their home base, and cats can't predict earthquakes. We may not know everything for sure, but we can make common sense choices based on what we do know.

ETA (LOL - that's Edited to add): Yes, my dogs have wacky accidents all the time because of their work, and we've gone in for x-rays a couple times shortly after a meal, maybe a couple hours. Twice there was nothing, and one time when it was about ninety minutes after a beef rib was fed, there was a rounded chip about the size of a pinky nail visible. The vet wasn't the least bit worried about that, either, and she's quite a hardliner on that sort of thing.

I feed Lucy raw soup bones and raw chicken parts occasionally and have never found passed pieces of bone. She will have powdery, white poops from all the cartilage on the soup bones, but poops from a raw chicken leg always look completely normal.

ORIGINAL: mudpuppy

try it yourself-- drop a chicken wing in a vat of acid. The bones go rubbery pretty darn quick. Dogs hold their food in the acid of their stomach for hours.

I and many other people have fed thousands of pounds of RAW bones to dogs and had no problems. None. Vets have this problem about distinguishing between raw and cooked bones; they see a lot of dogs come in with problems from being given cooked leftover bones, raiding the garbage and eating leftover cooked bones; and so they say "no bones" without thinking about it.

I've never seen bone pieces in my dogs poop. They occasionally vomit up pieces of bone that I guess didn't get "soft" enough in the acid of the stomach to be passed on. And I have a dog who has swallowed entire rabbits and huge pieces of chicken whole.

The benefits of feeding raw meaty bones far outweigh the almost non-existant risk. If you don't feed them odds are your dog will have to undergo multiple expensive and dangerous teeth-cleanings during its life.

My dog east no raw bones at all. She has a bully stick once or twice a week, a kong toy, and an occasional brushing, and the vet tells me that her teeth look like they were just professionally cleaned.

I guess until something happens to you you don't really think about it happening.  I hvae owned many dogs, family memembers all have dogs, most of our friends have dogs.  Most get their yearly vax and never had a problem at all.  KayCee didn't have a problem with her puppy vax nor her first set of annual vax, but we almost lost her to their 2ed set.  She was the first dog i ever knew of to have a reaction.  I have since found out thru health boards about many others.  But just in every day convesations, I still have not came across a single one that had a reaction to theire vax. My vet does not give her vax anymore except for law required rabies.
 
Proheart6 is different I have met face to face here in my little town 3 others whose dogs had reactions, and know for sure of a 4th, but never met them.
 
You just think it can't and won't happen to you....until it does.  Between what happened to Hunter and to KayCee, i am a little paranoid about many things dealing with my dogs, and seeing that dying lab pup didn't help with the bone situation--thos I grew up with our hunting dogs eating cooked chicken, quail, dove, squirrel, rabbit bones and never had a problem.  I just am to chicken to take a risk of a "first time" with my girls.

I'm sure vets see blockages and impactions from rawhides way more often than from raw bones, yet my vet who recommends rawhides but would be in shock if I told her i fed my dog raw chicken wings.
 

Vets have this problem about distinguishing between raw and cooked bones; they see a lot of dogs come in with problems from being given cooked leftover bones, raiding the garbage and eating leftover cooked bones; and so they say "no bones" without thinking about it.

 
Completely agree, they don't know that raw bones are different than cooked bones.  Most people don't know that.
 
Dogs have died from rawhides, greenies, kibble, canned food, vaccines etc etc I   Work within your own comfort level but also put things into perspective.

Dogs have been known to choke to death on kibble. Doesn't seem to stop anyone from feeding kibble, they rightly consider it the freak accident that it is.

I've never seen bone pieces in my dogs poop.

 
     I have. I gave Jessie a thick-walled raw marrow bone about 5 inches long, and after getting all the marrow she could easily reach, she began breaking pieces off the inner walls trying to get the rest of the marrow. I took the bone away because I was afraid she would chip a tooth. While I was walking her the next day, she acted very uncomfortable after passing stool. She paced back and forth several times, lying down occasionally. There were pieces of bone in her stool. She seemed fine after a short while so we continued our walk; she passed another stool with bone chips but it didn't bother her this time. There was no blood in either stool; if there had been, she would have went to the vet.

Yeah... I definitely think some dogs might not be able to handle some bones. Sydney and her best friend Jack both can't handle ribs, but Kenya does just fine on them... I've never seen bone pieces in their poop and I've given them a lot of different kinds. They both split a whole chicken once and I still didn't see any bones. I used to call Sydney a gulper until I watched a Cav. King Charles Spaniel swallow an entire greenie. Now, THAT's a gulper. And I feel much better letting my dogs eat natural foods as opposed to a greenie or some other weird bone. I also feed rawhide which some people are adamently opposed to, but hey, I've never had a problem and I don't expect to. Yeah, I've seen my dogs barf up pieces of it if they swallowed too big of a piece, but then they chew it into smaller pieces and they are fine.