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I have, at an uncountable number of times, been told that you shouldn't feed dogs pork, lamb, poultry and fish. The reason is that the dog will eat the bones, and the bones will fragment (as opposed to bones from cattle) and that is dangerous.

This doesn't make sense for several reasons:

  1. I don't believe a pack of wolves wouldn't eat a boar if they get a chance (yes, boars are dangerous, but an old or sick boar that can't defend itself). The same goes for birds, fish and lambs. It would be an evolutionary dead end if eating a board would kill a wolf. Similarly, street dogs aren't exactly picky with what they eat and if they find an injured bird on the ground or some chicken remains in a the trash, they'll eat it.

  2. Besides, why would they swallow large fragments of bone? The throat is the bottleneck, not the stomach or intestines. Clearly, as everyone who feed their dog dry fodder can see, the dog chews the pieces into something that it can swallow. Dogs/animals aren't stupid and try to swallow things that will choke them.

Finally, I can eat chicken bones. Many humans chew on the cartilage at the end of the thigh bones of chicken and unintentionally swallows some bone fragments. The same goes for fish - e.g., sardines are regularly served "ungutted" and you just swallow them, without problems. Bone marrow is very energy rich and it would be weird if dogs couldn't take advantage of that.

d-b
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    I think the point is that it's certainly not guaranteed or even necessarily the most likely outcome that the dog will have a medical issue after being given bones, but that it's pretty easy to avoid the problem altogether by not giving them bones that might be a danger to them in the first place. – Kai Feb 01 '22 at 23:01
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    Could you please add at least some of your sources? – Stephie Feb 02 '22 at 00:03
  • @Stephie I have plenty of sources, but not in English. – d-b Feb 02 '22 at 00:15
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    if you take a look at your sources i think there is one detail missing,never feed your dog cooked bones as cooked bones splinters,raw bones is less of a problem. – trond hansen Feb 02 '22 at 04:31
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    I've never heard not to feed muscle meat from any of those animals (all of which are exceedingly common in commercial dog food recipes), only to avoid feeding all types of cooked bones. – Allison C Feb 02 '22 at 14:33
  • you can still post your sources and we can use google translate to understand what it say. – trond hansen Feb 02 '22 at 16:28
  • There was a very recent discovery that even wolves, out there, can die from sharp bone fragments piercing their intestines. It's just common sense - razor sharp ends of bones vs sub-millimeter thick soft tissue of intestines. No need to be a rocket scientist to understand this. I feed my Husky with chicken, pork, beef and fish every day. Takes some time to de-bone it, but I sleep well knowing there is no sharp things inside her. Unfortunately, people sometimes throw chicken bones out there on the street and you just hear a split-second crunch as a warning, nothing you can do about that... – 3D Coder Mar 13 '22 at 21:40
  • @3DCoder Once when I was fishing with net I got some 30 breams, which are quite unedible. Well, after running them through a mincer twice the dogs ate it with great joy. We didn't debone or perform any other cleaning of the fishes - skin, eyes, fins etc - everything was run through the mincer. The dogs seemed to be perfectly fine after eating only this for a week or two (humans should problably be fine too but it wasn't that appetizing :-) – d-b Mar 18 '22 at 07:08

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