Reading about making stock from bones in the crockpot reminded me of a n.f. book about a chef at the CIA. All the students had to learn to make stock from boiling bones for hours, and there were a lot of students simmering a lot of bones. What did they do with all those bones? Bury them? Send them to a dog food company? Maybe a fertllizer factory? Because that’s a lot of stuff to get rid of.
Probably the same thing I do with meat bones when I’m done with them: throw them in the garbage.
Ideally, they’d be composted, but I agree that they probably end up in the landfill.
I happen to know a big dog with sad, begging eyes who would like to partner with your garbage.
I thought you weren’t supposed to give dogs cooked bones. Is that old information?
Why not? Perhaps you are thinking of chicken bones, which can be splintery and break into sharp shards. Beef bones do not. Yummy, or so I’ve heard.
Boiled out beef bones are rather fragile. One good chomp and they are gone. Toss them and give Duke a fresh bone with some meat on it.
No, but there’s a difference between bones from cooked chicken (which are still fairly strong and will snap and splinter) and bones simmered for hours to make stock, which will just crumble.
Cooked bones are particularly dangerous, because cooking makes bones more brittle, increasing the likelihood they might splinter and cause internal injury.
In any event, a lot of vets and the FDA are strongly recommending against any bones for dogs, even raw bones.
(Yes, dogs and wolves eat raw bones in the wild. It also surely kills them now and again. Also, I’m not responsible for vet bills for a wild dog; I am responsible for the vet bills if my own dog gets an intestinal blockage. This actually happened to an acquaintance at work, which led to a $3,000 vet bill.)
See cites here:
http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm208365.htm
My wife used to work for a culinary school, and they had a contract with a company that would take all their organic waste (including animal bones) and turn them into organic compost. Apparently, by law, (this is in Japan), they cannot throw it out with regular garbage even if they wanted to because of the danger of methane with rotting food.
This needs to become commonplace.
Making stock from bones is about transforming the connective tissues holding them together into gelatin and dissolving that gelatin in the water. This takes hours for thick bones. (see the stock-making episodes of Alton Brown’s Good Eats or Harold McGee’s opus, On Food and Cooking. Brown even shows how he knows this process has completed in chicken stock, and that you can stop the simmering and strain the stock: you grab one of the thick long limb bones and bend it. If it breaks easily, it’s done (I do this test, and the bone just sorta falls apart, the smallest bones just crumble away). Beef bones are more resistant, but can produce (with minimal effort, easily exceeded by dogs’ mouths) some nasty sharp chunks that I’d never want seen given to any of my dogs, even the one who is only mostly house-trained!
When I’m done with the bones and vegetables from stock making, I throw them out, as I presume chefs making demi-glace and culinary students learning how do also. I don’t have a compost pile that gets anywhere near hot enough to even attempt to compost meat by-products. I suppose if I was really concerned I could burn them, but why?
The ones I have are so soft that you could even eat them if you were so inclined.
That strange enrollee, the one whom everyone is shy of talking to because he stares so intently and barely speaks, volunteered to take them to the dump with a note from the school explaining all the bones. He generally adds a bag of his own to the waste.