We’ve been feeding our dogs raw chicken with bone for the last 15 years. First whole leg, now we grind whole bird (without skin). Our first dog started with chicken legs for several years. As she got older it became a little more problematic – sometimes the small knuckles wouldn’t get completely absorbed and she would throw them up. At some point she broke a tooth too, but we couldn’t rule out it wasn’t from a fall.
About the same time we got our second dog (now 6 years ago) at 7 months old. He was raised on raw but was given whole bird chicken to share with his liter mates. When we adopted him we used whole legs as we were doing with our other dog but we think because it was a smaller piece he didn’t quite eat it completely enough and had a piece of bone stuck on the way out.
At that point, we put them both on skinless ground chicken (meat, bone and gizzards). It isn’t as good for them because they don’t get the jaw exercise or the teeth cleaning but we feel we didn’t have a choice. Whole foods was grinding for us for 6 years, while but every other year it seems one store would discontinue doing it. So we changed stores from Long Beach, to Torrance, then lastly to DTLA. Now they wont do it at all so we just purchased a LEM #32 electric grinder . We’ll still have Whole Foods skin and chop up the chicken but we will have to run it through our own grinder.
Our younger dog has learned to eat bone just fine now because he has caught quail and chipmunks and had no problem with them lol. So whole bird rather than pieces is probably a better option. Also to mention our dogs weigh 50 pounds.
