Advice Please on Bones

As everyone knows I get loads of bones every week. Tonight I opened my black bin liners to sort it all out and bag and freeze them. In them are some ribcages with tails attached, I think they are sheep, or they were sheep anyway. Now, are these recreational bones or would they count as a meal???
I have my ever hungry little lad, but my girlies are chubby, especially Cariad, so I am thinking maybe should count them as a day's meal, there is a fair amount of meat on the tail bits. Am I right??? Or should I count them as a day's meal for the fatties and recreational for the little lad???

I can't believe you've asked that after all your years of raw feeding lol! sorry June, it made me giggle though Good on you for asking though lol! I would give it to the chubbies as a meal after you've given them a small amount of tripe or what ever as they need that to mix with their veggies [ one rule of thumb for chubbies is to up their veggies and lower their meat]then give them the carcas after their meal. Baby can afford the little extra bone now and then so I would treat it as a snack/bone lol! XX

I usually give them their veg with the 1/4 pack of pet mince they have in the morning, I was thinking of giving them the ribcage and tail as brekkie and see how they go on with it, maybe give them sardines for tea with veg in it. I was just a bit stuck with them being fatties, I wouldn't normally give them lamb as it is so fatty, when it was very cold this last winter they had lamb them to help keep them warm (probably why they are fatties now )
However the ribcages are far too big for me to freeze and keep till winter, so they will have to be fed to them tomorrow. They are in my covered bucket ready for them in the morning
I thought little lad would be OK with them as recreational, but just needed to check my thoughts were along the right track. Thanks for the advice

June take the chubbies off the mince if it is pet mince as it's usually all fat. As for giving them the fish, I would leave it and only give them the meal that I suggested, that is more than enough for them with the weight that they are carrying lol!

The mince is what my butcher makes and is 100% chicken, he makes it from carcass and I have seen him doing it, so I know exactly what goes in it. They get a sliver (and I do mean a sliver) of ox heart and every so often a chicken wing for brekkie with their veg and vits, a bone at lunch then a tin of sardines, tuna, tripe, turkey neck or white fish for tea. So the pack of mince is divided into half, little lad gets half, then they get the remaining half divided between them, some mornings they get a turkey wing for brekkie instead.

It's obviously still a tad too much as they would'nt be chubby. I would give even smaller portions June.

Poor girlies/chubbies
You'd have laughed to see my face when I opened the bin liners to see what looked like half skeletons of sheep in there never been faced with that before

Said with affection !

Fatties had the sheep each for brekkie and little lad had a turkey wing. I have saved him a rib cage sans tail for his lunch, girlies had pilchards last night so tonight they can have tuna and veggies and their vits and little lad can have something I haven't dragged out of the freezer yet I just managed to get it all in the smaller freezer last night, now I have to drag everything out to find something for his tea!!!!
Cariad is funny with the sheep, she has it laid out neatly in the yard and is marching around it taking bits off here and there, Lona whisked her's straight into the kennel and is munching away like there is no tomorrow Little lad grabbed the turkey wing and ran away into the big kennel before either his mum or auntie could take possession

Admin wrote:As everyone knows I get loads of bones every week. Tonight I opened my black bin liners to sort it all out and bag and freeze them. In them are some ribcages with tails attached, I think they are sheep, or they were sheep anyway. Now, are these recreational bones or would they count as a meal???
I have my ever hungry little lad, but my girlies are chubby, especially Cariad, so I am thinking maybe should count them as a day's meal, there is a fair amount of meat on the tail bits. Am I right??? Or should I count them as a day's meal for the fatties and recreational for the little lad???

Yes absolutely you should count everything that the Norties eat as being food. If they can crunch up into small enough pieces any bones, whether they are meaty or not, then they will be digested by the stomach enzymes, converted into glycogen to be used either as energy or converted to fat. Bones, even plain unmeaty bones, contain carbs, carbs which as we all know make us fat, particularly if they are bones containing marrow - marrow is very carbohydrate-rich, like liver, so therefore very fattening - very nutritious of course, but fattening nonetheless. To give an example of Tai's average daily food intake, this is what I feed him. He has nothing at all until after his first walk of the day, after which he will have a chicken wing, 2 at the most, or a small part of a turkey neck. He has nothing else until his evening meal, which he is given after his second walk of the day. A typical meal will be a pound of Landywoods minced meat with raw veg, a cod liver oil capsule, a couple of chicken wings and a raw meaty bone, probably a couple of ribs of breast of lamb. If we have been on a mountain bike ride, typically consisting of about 20 miles for us, more like 30 or 40 for him because he runs up and down a lot, then we will feed him as above, but he will get perhaps a whole turkey neck as well and a little raw liver. And that's it.

We tend to feed according to the amount of exercise taken. If, as happened after the dog show last weekend, it was so hot and Tai is exhausted, then we would hardly give him anything to eat at all, as he only went for about 1 mile on each of his 2 walks therefore did not need nearly so much food. We check his backbone regularly to make sure if it is really bony, and check that we can easily feed his ribcage, and that's it, we don't weigh him, we just keep a weather eye on his boniness! If he starting to get a bit too well covered, we up the exercise and cut down on the chicken wings, turkey necks (which are very fattening), and fill his bowl out with things like chopped raw carrot.

Just as with us, it is all about putting into the gob less calories than we expend out in energy. I just wish I could extend the same level of control on myself as I do on my dog - I would then be a size 10 !!

Hope this helps xx

Another good thing to remember perhaps is that dogs do not need to eat every day. I have never been able to starve my dogs for 1 day a week, but I know some people who do. It is supposed to be very good for them to give their digestive tract a rest, as in the wild they certainly would not make a kill every day - more like once a week if they were lucky!

If Tai or Gucci turn their noses up at what they have been given, then the bowl is immediately picked up and put in the fridge. No faddiness allowed in this house with children or dogs, so if you ever present them with something new June and they turn their noses up, just let them starve, they will soon eat it when they get hungry enough! When we converted Hal onto BARF, he ate nothing for a week except 1 chicken wing a day. He just would not eat raw meat, but in the end he was so starving hungry and so thin that he had to give in and eat! He came to absolutely no harm at all, he was just very thin for a while until he put the weight back on. It was a case of being cruel to be kind.

Good for you BTW for exposing yourself to Keeper's LOL's !!! Meant kindly of course, we all love the Norties to bits, and you, you old baglet you !! Incidentally, I have to say tbf how very well I thought you looked considering your vast age! I would never have put you at 61, more like 51, Mike commented on your running abilities round that ring in the heat !! My poor knee still hasn't covered from my pathetic hobblings!!

Ooooh tell Mike off for peeking at my knees

My girls are getting nothing like Tai gets, in fact they don't get that between them!!! I now have my biking equipment, although not a harness as the measurements never worked, so will maybe get a normal harness, I can't do any biking at the moment with it being so hot and they get a run on the river with squeaky balls for them to fetch to me. Lona and Blaidd go swimming, Cariad won't go in past her tummy, once we get a bit of cooler weather she will get the longer walks and a bike ride when I do one to ones, with Lona doing the swimming I feel it has definately made a difference. I can't do one to one's at the moment because my sciatica has flared up again and am existing on pain killers, so's I can run around the ring The bonus of having 3 means that there is always company for someone, the drawback is that by the time I have done 3 separate walks I am ready for bed, even if it is only midday
Good point about counting the bones as food Nikki, I had considered it but never considered it ENOUGH, they always get a bone at lunch usually with a banana. Then again if they were doing the 20 odd mile bike ride with me I reckon the weight would fall off them. A lot of this is from the situation I was in during the winter, I couldn't really get them out for walks because once the babies went outside I had to consider the risk of cross infection if I took Cariad anywhere, plus it was so icy I was scared ofslipping and breaking something, Lona couldn't go out because of cross infection and so it stayed for a very long time, meanwhile I had upped their food intake because of the intense cold, like we know to our cost it is a heck of a lot easier to put ON weight than it is to take it OFF My girlies have always eaten everything put down for them with rare exceptions like Cariad won't eat a whole fresh fish whilst Lona swallows it like a seal, Cariad will eat a whole rabbit with fur and just leaves me the skull and fur neatly wrapped around it, Lona won't even look at it. Blaidd does seem a little more picky, but like you Nikki I just take the bowl up, and it goes in the fridge till the next mealtime. There is stuff he really doesn't like, tuna being one, but if I mash a tin of sardines in it he eats it, I remember all you used to go through to get Hal to eat tripe I know Lyn does a fast day as does Janine, I am afraid I can't do it, I am not able to resist those faces I think all I can do for the moment is chip away at them, Cariad has lost some weight but not enough, and then will start biking when it is cooler, at the moment I am determined to enjoy this lovely weather as 6 months ago we were hacking our way through ice and snow out of the house and into the car, wood was being chopped to keep the fire, heating and hot water going, and the babies were under 2 heat lamps!!! I know which I prefer
Thanks for all the input, it is great that there is such a vast store of knowledge and experience on here for us all to tap into, me included, there is always something new to be learned and I am never too old (despite what Nikki says ) to learn
Nikki, you're not look so bad yourself for an old fart....(she is older than me really )

i know this is off topic but do you ever wonder what it would be like to not have bones in your body?

an on topic i would consider giving the gang the bones (if there is a decent amount of meat on them) for a meal?

we would be amoebas Bex

Billinghurst does recommend a very high proportion of bones in his books

our gang do have a lot of bones the boarders have a chew too lol

edit: it does make their pop white a crumbly i find

Yeah the crumbly white poo shows too much bone in the food so that indicates that you need to give something without a lot of bone, such as tinned or fresh fish, with extra veg, the poo should be firm, brown, small and easy to pick up

yeah normally it is firm like today but sometimes i see horid white ones lol

Jazz wrote:yeah normally it is firm like today but sometimes i see horid white ones lol

thats normally shadows she goes round after having her bone and nicks everyone elses after they finished with them and eats them as well.

Sounds just like her Auntie Lona, eats everything at top speed then goes round tormenting until she can get whatever is left

Doesn't sound like you are over-feeding June at all in terms of quantity. As you say, the winter was a stinker, not conducive at all to bike rides and long long walks. Things like sardines are absolutely great for dogs, but because they are cooked and therefore very easily digested, they are quite fattening, as are soft fruits like banana and melon. Personally, Tai very very rarely has soft fruits like these for this reason, any bananas that have gone over are mashed up with his meat, but quantity adjustments are made to compensate for the carbs. Carbs in particular are extremely fattening to dogs, they don't need them for energy, they will use fat for energy ... just like us when we go on the Atkins diet, instead of the body converting the carbohydrate into glycogen and thence if unused into fat, the dog will burn the fat he consumes in his food for energy. Fat cannot be stored as fat, hence the reasoning behind the Atkins diet. So, I would possibly be tempted for now to cut right down on the carbs and concentrate on meat, meaty bones and raw veg only. No harm in the odd bit of fruit that would otherwise go off chucked in, or left-over table scraps (I hate waste), but watch out on the poultry wing and liver fronts, organ meat too such as heart and kidney is higher in carbohydrate than muscle meat and fat.

I so agree about the starvation day, I just can't do it, I feel such a meanie. Silly really because I used to starve myself totally for days at a time when I was younger in an attempt to be a size 12, but then I didn't have to look at my brown pleading eyes !!

I wouldn't worry too much about exercising them in the heat either. We still take Tai on long bike rides in the heat, provided there is shade for rest periods, and we carry loads of water on our bikes. We stop when we are biking along the canals about every mile or so in the shade, give him a drink, let him get his breath back and bike on. If there isn't much shade, we push him in (he usually manages to fall in in any case, the clumsy great oaf!), and this is of course very cooling. Even when Tai was plump and unfit at the start of the season, we would take him out for around 20 miles - we had that very hot spell a few weeks ago in early May, but he coped very well, the secret is to let them rest frequently and watch out for any flagging, they will let you know when they are truly overheated and not just unfit.

The reason they are getting bananas aplenty at the moment is because it is soooo hot they are going brown extremely quickly, I like greenish bananas so they get them when I don't fancy them.
Doesn't sound as though there is a lot left to give them from your list, they occasionally get a chicken wing, turkey wing each for brekkie maybe a couple of times a week, the rest of the time 1/4 pack of chicken mince each with a sliver of heart, gone are the days when they used to get half a lamb heart each or a chunk of ox heart, they get tuna, pilchards and sardines, and of course white fish which is 6 pieces for £3 at Iceland, tripe and a couple of pieces of turkey neck that are Landywoods for tea. Today they got the lamb rib/tail for brekkie and I have a piece of fish out for them each for tea.
No way can I face biking in this heat anyway, so will start that when I can, not ridden a bike (except at the disasterous Center Parc trip in February) for around 40 odd years, however my Center Parc trip did prove to me that I could still do it and didn't fall off. Maybe get myself a sled for the coming winter eh that should certainly burn of some of their fat, and probably send me a fear induced zombie-like state

scootering is fun! i recommend getting the gangline and harnesses now just to get them used to it before you start in the winter. we're not doing any work until winter either mia and merlin love it, shadow will when she calms down a bit

My measuring is rubbish Bex, I could never get my measurements anything like they said they should have been for the x back harness I did exactly as it said on the chart thingy and it was way out, so am a bit fed up about that, going to have another go at it, but will stick to the biking for the time being because I can use a normal harness on that.

i tell you what, i'll get mum to bring up our harnesses (we have three sizes) and try them on your gang to find out the sizes

I have this wonderful image of June in true Boadicea fashion being carted by the Norties along the river at top speed, hair streaming out behind, totally out of control having the time of her life !!

Go for it girl !!