One frequently hears this put forth. Supposedly they are more likely to splinter into sharp fragments than raw bones. How do I know this is the case?
I had always imagined this to be true, so I was surprised to see some raw venison bones splinter into some pretty sharp fragments as my dog was breaking them up. Not an isolated incident, either, I have seen this fairly often. Still, she has never had a problem. And, I have known many dogs who ate cooked chicken bones their whole life without problem. So I am a bit skeptical.
Why are cooked bones more likely to do so? And isn’t “cooked bones” an overly broad category? Surely bones simmered in a crock pot for hours would fracture differently than bones quickly baked in an oven or fried in a pan.
What kind of test can be done to demonstrate whether there is any truth to this statement? And where did this assertion even originate?
Well, but do they? Yeah, I hear this all the time too, but is it true? In my experience, raw bones splinter pretty easily too. What makes you think this is true? And certainly bones can be cooked in many different ways. If I quickly sear a rare steak, is that really enough time to make the bones brittle? If I stew something in a crockpot all day, wouldn’t that make the bones LESS likely to splinter?
Is this one of those things people repeat because it sounds true, like we only use 10% of our brains?
One bone cooked or raw likely isn’t going to kill a dog. But dogs do die from perforated intestines from bones. So do wolves. How often? Bet figures on that are hard to come by. How many dogs die because they never had a bone in their life?
Sure, but one might also ask how many kids die from never riding a bike? Or how many kids break their arm from never playing on the monkey bars? Hard to imagine many other things more intrinsic to the essence of dogness than chewing on a bone.
But, in any case, my question is not about whether or not dogs should be fed bones. My question is about whether cooked bones are in fact more likely to splinter than raw bones, and how one might verify whether there is any truth to this statement.
[aside]The Ballad of Chicken Soupway my first artistic introduction to death. I could never skip over it, but it was a horrible, distressing, and to this day, haunting song. I’d always assumed the subject was a dog. Looking over the lyrics, I have no idea why, or if it was just me.
I’m putting the rest of the album on Rhapsody now, because it’s just that good. And now I need to feel better.
Oh, I HAVE heard a million times that you never give dogs CHICKEN bones because of how easily they splinter. Never beef bones though, which are pretty dense.
I’ve heard exactly this (no chicken bones ever), but never any warnings about cooked bones. We fed our neighbors’ Newfoundland dogs leftover steak and pork chop bones for years. They would gnaw those things to bits.
This advice has been around a long time. Long enough that ‘cooked’ may in fact mean ‘boiled in.a stockpot for an extended period’ -the keeping of a stockpot is no longer as popular as once it was.
Bones that have been boiled for stock are often exceptionally brittle and splintery, as the boiling removes the gelatin from them.
OK, I’ll be honest, I read the first six responses and was disgusted enough to not read further.
First, there are bones, then there are COOKED bones. Proteins break down at cooking temperatures (to Goober it down by a lot).
Hence, bones can become brittle and shatter after cooking.
I personally give my dogs beef bones after I’ve cooked them down for stock. Those break easily and with little force (OK, the dogs ARE pitbulls, but I also know what simple cooked bones fare too). Cooked and boiled for stock leeches many minerals and destroys proteins from the bone, eliminating essential structural links from said bone and make it brittle.
Now, pork tends to form sharp shards, compared to blunter forms in beef.
Add to that digestive acids AND breed tolerance, one ends up with pork bones are evil, beef is OK, overall.
REALITY, dogs are essentially domestic wolves and are BUILT to eat RAW meat and scavenge on occasional fires or other disasters. Hence, they’re not BUILT for cooked foods, overall. But, HUMANS insist ALL foods must be cooked, with occasional deleterious results.
We had a Dutch Shepard and an American Pit Bull. BOTH ate bones of ALL sorts, at times, whether we wished it or not (courtesy of said Dutch Shepard). Said dog actually opened our refrigerator and stole pork shoulders on numerous occasions.
At first, we assumed HE couldn’t and something ELSE happened, but once, the PLATE that held said pork shoulder went missing, which was absurd in our environment, so I bought a camera and placed it to observe the fridge.
We watched the Dutch Shepard open the fridge, pull the plate out with the pork shoulder and hide said plate under the stove, then open the back door and take it outside into the garden (where I found it).
He also vomited once, after eating the pork shoulder (right BEFORE I bought the camera), vomiting a double handful of pork bones that were rather interestingly rounded, considering the original state of said bones (whole).
THAT said, we’ve NEVER permitted (but, twice) chicken bones be eaten by our dogs.
We’ve baked THOSE for stock and WELL noted the shards resulting from baking said bones…
Cooked bones don’t break down in a dog’s stomach very well. Pork and beef “soup” bones are larger and are more likely to be chewed into small chunks and pass through without damage.
Chicken (or rabbit, or any small animal) bones are thinner and tend to be gulped down in long, sharp shards.
Over 20 years ago neighbors of mine thought they were being nice when they gave my dog a roast chicken carcass over the fence. Instead, they killed him. Perforated intestine, despite surgery to remove bone fragments and a large portion of intestine and being kept on IV antibiotics, he died of sepsis. Neighbors apparently fed their dog (a border collie) cooked bones all the time. I think they, and the dog, had just been lucky thus far.
Once - maybe 10 years ago - I bought some of those smoked pork femurs (sold for dogs), which in retrospect, was pretty stupid. The Destructo-Rott ate two of them completely, got a very sore stomach, and just before I was about to take her to the vet, horked up an alarmingly huge pile of slimy bone chips and felt much better.
I personally don’t think that cooked bones of any sort are a good idea for dogs. There are safer things to give them to chew on.
I’m sure the Mythbusters could easily test this. They have force gauges that can measure the strength up to and until a shaft breaks, and examine the fragments.
Fresh bones aren’t rods of stone that just happen to be inside animal legs, they’re multiple layers of mineralized tissue, with interior layers of softer flexible tissue. Fresh bones flexible, to a small but useful extent. You get the idea that lengthy cooking will extract flavor, that’s the collagen cooking out, leaving a hollow shell of minerals. And such a bone can shatter into sharp fragments. The dog’s stomach acids may be able to dull the points before serious damage occurs, or it may not. Or the bone shard can just penetrate the soft tissues of the throat, and get stuck. Can’t really test that one, just have to accept the testimonial of vets, who are working from a bigger pool of examples than the average dog owner.
Right, this is along the lines of what I’m after – actual experimental data, rather than simply repeating what one has heard. I had intentions of testing this out myself, with raw bones vs. bones cooked in different ways, but I’m not really sure how to quantify my results. In any case, I will at least get a sense of what is going on I think.
I tried my first experiment today. Shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but if you cook chicken bones in a crock pot all day, they get pretty soft. You can actually crush the smaller ones between your fingers if you squeeze hard enough. And if you try to break one in half, no sharp edges. So, clearly, SOME cooked bones are quite safe. The dog quite appreciated the results of experiment #1. Again, no surprise, but at least it gives me a way of getting rid of my chicken bones.
Actually, what I expect, with raw chicken bones, is that they will be springier, and more difficult to break; but when they do break, they will yield fragments just as sharp as cooked bones. And since a dog is going to break up the bones before they are eaten, as opposed to just gumming them for a while, the actual difficulty of breaking the bone is really not all that important. That is my hypothesis, anyway. I will see…
Gee, I thought getting the pork shoulder out of the fridge was crazy impressive. Now if you could only teach him to throw it in a 350 degree oven, you’d have a dog that earned its kibble.
