Dotty, maybe the vet's bacterial concerns have to do with the bacterial types
associated with industrial chicken production and processing. Even a rotting
animal in the wild may not have certain types of bacteria which might be more
common in industrial confinement operations and huge scale slaughterhouses.

There are things like campylobacter (sp?) which are according to Gail
Damerow's books (Chicken Health Handbook, Chickens in your Backyard) very
common in industrial meat chickens but not common in home raised chickens.

I would not purchase and feed industrial production (supermarket) chickens raw
to dogs, and I try to avoid industrial chicken in any form, including cooked
or processed. The industrial meat lines of chickens are raised in horrible
inhumane conditions and they are themselves incredibly abnormal birds, about
as genetically unnatural as you can get without actual gene splicing. The
whole chicken "industry" is a sickening thing.

My dogs eat lots of chicken poop. I regularly feed all my dogs home butchered
raw chicken feet, some of the dogs can also handle the heads and those parts
of the viscera that I don't eat myself. But our chickens are home bred and
forage in woods and pasture. They are raised in a healthy environment, and
they are old types of disease resistant breeds too. And home butchering can be
very clean.

The people I know who have started eating home butchered chickens quickly stop
being able to tolerate that rotten smell of store purchased chicken.

I used to have trouble with some of the dogs getting diarrhea if I fed raw
beef marrow bones. I thought it might be too much fat at once, or maybe
bacteria. Last time I parboiled the raw beef bones in boiling water for a
certain amount of time with the idea of kiilling off surface bacteria without
cooking internally. No problem with any intestinal upsets that time, though
one instance is not proof.

Gina

due to things like On Thursday 21 July 2005 1:39, Dotty Harala wrote:

> My vet does not agree with it and
> lectures me if it comes up, he thinks it is too dangerous not because of
> the bones (since as you say they are pliable when raw, and become dangerous
> when cooked), but he thinks the bacterial count is potentially too high and
> says they might get a bad bacterial infection.