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Just heard last weekend how a dog swallowed either a whole one or a large piece of one and got obstructed.

 

They've also been known to cause esophageal problems as well. None of the vets I personally know recommend them.

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Ha ha, you'll never be Asian. It's true, we don't age.

 

I tan nicely, and don't have B.O., and hardly ever have to shave my legs either.

 

However, it would be nice to have boobs. Damn you Europeans!

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and hardly ever have to shave my legs either.
now I'm jealous

 

 

Quick yes or no question---Though I'm pretty sure the answer is a no.

 

Can I continue with the kibble and just buy him a chicken neck a couple times a week? Will they get some befefit?

 

I think not because of digesting and the carbs (of what I think I'm getting) Besides I don't think I can pluck a chicken neck---I can't even devein shrimp for DH.

 

But maybe on Thanksgiving instead of throwing away all the "extras" can that be a holiday treat? Gibblets Raw or cooked?

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You can buy prepackaged turkey necks at some grocery stores as well as Walmart supercenters. No plucking needed :rolleyes:

 

As for mixing kibble and raw, some people say absolutely not and some say it is okay. (I am still new to this concept and have been reading up on it - one book says some raw is more beneficial than none at all)

 

But there are much more experienced people out there....

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I think one neck a week might be ok. I would go for turkey necks instead though, and I would feed them frozen or partially frozen so the dog takes longer to chew and gets more benefit out of it.

 

Do realize that necks contain quite a bit of bone and could possibly constipate a kibble-fed dog.

 

I'm not 100% sure to be honest.

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If you feed your dogs twice a day, there's no reason they couldn't have raw food for one meal and kibble for the other. But if you only ever give one thing for the raw meal it'll throw the balance out of whack.

 

Supposedly it's unsafe to give kibble and raw in the same meal.

 

Turkey neck bones can be really hard. Not break your teeth hard, but big hard chunks hard. Small hen necks are better than big tom necks. My supermarkets only ever seem to have really gigantic dinosaur-looking turkey necks so I stopped buying them.

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I have a really dumb question. I have been reading this post from the beginning and just trying to follow the different terms for raw feeding is hard. :confused: Using spreadsheets and number crunching. Wow! I know I am definitely not ready for anything like that yet, but what does RMB stand for????

Thanks.

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Um, I have hiney and boobs enough to outfit anyone in need, and I'd give it all up for a break from the razor and deodorant. Please? Don't make me beg. Sounds like a win-win to me.

 

:rolleyes:

 

For a while I fed kibble in the AM with raw Chicken in the PM with no probs (but you're talking about a 12 hour span from brekkie to dinner). You'll hear different arguments for and against that, but it worked just fine for us. But, on the other hand, that was what we did EVERY day, so they were used to it too (rather than a raw piece here and there).

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Supposedly it's unsafe to give kibble and raw in the same meal.
Why is that, Melanie? Is this claim credible? I give kibble and raw all the time and never have a problem (and even when I don't, my guys dig their own raw out of the compost pile :rolleyes: ).

 

Kim

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Lemme see if I can answer this correctly:

 

Carb laden meals significantly slow down digestion for dogs. They have short digestive tracts for the purpose of digesting meats quickly and with much different acidity in the stomach as people. Feeding carbs and raw meat together is not a great idea from the standpoint that meat infected with salmonella is not digested quickly enough and can make your dog sick where as salmonella infected meat fed alone is digested too quickly and at the proper PH levels to make the dog sick from it. It would instead be shed in the feces.

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I have always been told that feeding raw and kibble at the same meal is a no-no because of the rate of digestion of each. Kibble can take 12 hours to be digested and raw about 4 hours - so feeding them both together can cause havoc with their digestive systems. I couldn't point you to any research on it and I haven't tried it myself (I mean I haven't tried it on my dogs!).

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Thanks,

One problem I see with the in vitro study conducted by the author is that in vivo the stomach w/could presumably secrete more acid during digestion. I would be interested to know the pH of the chyme leaving the stomach. It also doesn't link raw meat + carbohydrate digestion with actual morbidity. Given my previous experiences, I don't think I'd stop mixing raw foods and kibble (or stop feeding a high quality kibble) based on this information.

 

I'd appreciate seeing more research about raw diets, and I'll keep looking too.

 

Kim

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Originally posted by donna frankland (uk):

[i once read somewhere that the massive pressure required of the jaw when consuming a large item releases something in the dogs brain, that sends the dog into this state.

chris o, does this make sense to you?

**********

LOL

Not a jot of it! But I'm not good at the scientific stuff at all. Lemme ask around, okay?

Chris O

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Originally posted by SoloRiver:

knew I was going to regret getting involved in this.

**********

I know what you mean.

 

 

(a) Calcium is important.

**********

Absolutely. No doubt about it.

 

 

(:rolleyes: Ungulate bones do indeed break teeth. One of my dogs has broken two teeth, one on a large meaty knuckle bone, and I'm not interested in repeating the experience. YMMV.

**********

So do rocks and branches and Nylabones and Greenies and virtually anything that goes into a dog's mouth, save maybe pablum. I have never suggested otherwise. However, I also have never suggested feeding inappropriate bones...and to my a meaty knuckle bone is inappropriate. Most weight-bearing bones are. What weight-bearing bones are best suited to is anchoring the meat so the dog has to work to get the meat off. Otherwise, I consider typical ugulate weight-bearing bones to be "wreck bones" and not food at all. Ungulates other than cow though can offer bones with greater flexibility.

 

 

© Large bone shards still worry me. This is my prerogative.

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Absotively, posilutely. And turkey necks still worry me. But I base my concerns on how my dogs respond to their raw meaty bones, AND to how much meat is on a typical turkey neck.

 

Fortunately, bones that are donsidered likely to shard off can be avoided without compromising a good raw diet. Which is how I deal with turkey necks...I do not.

 

 

By the way, wolves break teeth too.

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Never said they did not. However, in the wild, wolves for better or worse make their own dining decisions. Our domestic wolves have us to identify risk and act accordingly. Also to take them to a vet if needs be, if any misfortune should occur.

 

 

So do lions and tigers. So do dogs and coyotes.

**********

I am not talking about interbreeding as an end...horses and donkeys interbreed, too. But the product of their union is infertile. The result of a dog/coyote cross is an F1 mix. It almost always infertile. I have no idea if lions and tigers produce fertile offspring but I doubt it.

 

 

The biological species concept is only one way of delineating species, and many "good" species are interfertile.

**********

I'm not sure what this means.

 

 

I consider dogs and wolves (and coyotes) to be the same biological species, but that is not the only way to look at species, and just calling them all the same thing and leaving it at that ignores a hell of a lot of interesting variation, both biological and behavioral.

**********

Coyotes are a different species...and they are catagorized accordingly based on replicable, quantifiable physiological traits and characteristics. Variation in a species is not the same as variation between species. Clearly there is huge variation in species, all you have to do is look at wolves in their multiplicity and look at dogs.

 

 

[When it comes to interactions between organism and environment, it's the phenotype that's important, not the genotype. So I'm not really sure what your point is here.

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Nope, genotype is what drives the species. Phenotype, the cosmetic variations between members of the same species, can be modified in short order; genotype doesn't change in response to time frames that describe the existence of dogs. Phenotype may indeed affect how English Bulldogs breathe or or how sighthounds manage to catch rabbits while BCs manage to manage stock. But the genotype is what provides ALL the raw ingredients that enables man to pick and choose which physical manifestations to breed for.

 

 

Everyone knows that we are practically identical to chimpanzees on the level of our DNA, but no one would deny that we are very different animals.

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The chimp/man relationship doesn't work. The genetic difference between chimp and humans is little better than the genetic difference between humans and a banana. 4% is not in any way instructive when looking at .02 genetic difference.

 

 

Why not use the coyote as a model for feeding whole prey?

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Because they removed themselves from the evolutionary path long before dogs left. Because they differ in behavior as a species from what wolves do...and dogs continue to maintain a pack mentality, which makes sense, given that they are still wolves, only a subspecies of them.

 

 

Says who? Which evolution guidebook contains the table that tells you how much time is enough? How do you define "substantive?"

*****

I think it might be more useful for you to read the source material, and it would be more beneficial for dogs for me to let the experts tell the story.

 

I would be delighted to send you a number of links to studies published by Robert Wayne, by L. David Mech and others for whom this topic is lifework.

 

It's really not necessary for me to reiterate their findings, and it certainly isn't necessary to indulge in debate at the expense of others on this list.

Chris O

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Hi Chris,

 

I'm quite familiar with the work of Wayne and Mech, among others. I'm sorry, but it doesn't say what you think it says and you can't use it to make the arguments that you've made.

 

You have used interfertility and genetic similarity to argue that dogs and wolves have the same adaptation. This is a strange argument. (By the way: "it is the genotype that drives the species?" What the heck does that mean?) Although genomes can, theoretically, demonstrate adaptation in and of themselves, when we talk about adaptation in terms of diet, ecological niche, etc., we are talking about phenotype, not genotype. It is the phenotype that interacts with the environment. You remain confused on this issue.

 

Two species can be genetically quite unrelated and still share the same ecological niche and eat the same diet. Species that are genetically quite related may have divergent adaptations and eat very different things. By your argument, the closely-related species should get the same diet, because their genomes are similar, and the more distantly-related species should get different diets, even if they eat exactly the same thing in the wild. This makes no sense whatsoever.

 

You have an odd and very narrow definition of "phenotype." Phenotype means much more than simply variation among individuals in a species (by the way, this variation -- which you consider insignificant -- is exactly the variation upon which natural selection operates, as any of my Bio 102 students would be able to tell you). The genotype of an organism doesn't interact directly with the environment and so using it as a yardstick of adaptation -- or the fit of an organism to its environment (to use the "state of" definition as opposed to the "process of" definition) is both strange and misguided. For the genotype to be affected by selection, it must be expressed. There isn't a one-to-one relationship between genetic variation and phenotypic variation. If there were, then domestic dogs would not be as strikingly genetically homogeneous as they are, for the phenotypic variation encompassed by domestic dogs alone greatly surpasses that found in many other mammal genera, let alone species.

 

Coyotes and dogs are certainly interfertile. Coydog crosses are quite common in some areas, and yes, they have puppies. What's more, by your argument there's no reason to doubt that coyotes and dogs can have pups, because it is well known that coyotes and wolves can hybridize and produce fertile offspring (red wolves carry a significant amount of coyote DNA, and the red wolf population is certainly not made up entirely of F1 crosses), and since you think there are no differences between wolves and dogs, I am not sure why you would think that dogs and coyotes couldn't produce fertile offspring. According to the biological species concept, these canids are all the same species. (You may want to read up on species concepts -- it's a huge, fascinating, and at times highly philosophical literature.)

 

Dogs and wolves may indeed require exactly the same diet for optimum nutrition. However, this is a question that is not answered using the arguments you've used.

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You guys lost me a few posts back with your big words and educated arguments but on another list not related to diet I read this and thought one or both of you would understand what this is about. I don't understand it but I thought it was interesting! Here's the post and an excerpt apparently:

 

Molecular evolution of the dog family by Robert K. Wayne.

 

The evolution of the domestic dog

The earliest remains of the domestic dog date from 10 to15 thousand years ago21;

the diversity of these remains suggests multiple domestication events at

different times and places. Dogs may be derived from several different ancestral

gray wolf populations, and many dog breeds and wild wolf populations must be

analysed in order to tease apart the genetic sources of the domestic dog gene

pool. A limited mtDNA restriction fragment analysis of seven dog breeds and 26

gray wolf populations from different locations around the world has shown that

the genotypes of dogs and wolves are either identical or differ by the loss or

gain of only one or two restriction sites22. The domestic dog is an extremely

close relative of the gray wolf, differing from it by at most 0.2% of mtDNA

sequence15,22,23.

 

In comparrison, the gray wolf differs from its closest wild relative, the

coyote, by about 4% of mitochondrial DNA sequence14 (Fig. 4). Therefore, the

molecular genetic evidence does not support theories that domestic dogs arose

from jackal ancestors24. Dogs are gray wolves, despite their diversity in size

and proportion; the wide variation in their adult morphology probably results

from simple changes in developmental rate and timing25.

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Originally posted by SoloRiver:

 

I'm quite familiar with the work of Wayne and Mech, among others. I'm sorry, but it doesn't say what you think it says and you can't use it to make the arguments that you've made.

**********

More than likely I am inadequate to the task of having to defend my choices. I am not a scientist and frankly do not need to understand the innermost working of a dog/wolf to recognize an appropriate way to feed my dogs. This doesn't mean I am unaware of the "right" reasons, only than I cannot communicate them to you in a manner you approve of. There clearly are people better-suited to the task, and I think your addressing your concerns to them would be the most useful for your purposes. Such action certainly would provide you with less annoying answers than the ones I give you.

 

Any links you can suggest that support your arguments would be terrific!

Chris O

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