Give a dog a bone?
July 24, 2018 8:58 PM   Subscribe

My German Shepherd LOVES bones. How do I prepare the bones I purchased so they are safe to leave out for him?

I bought several pounds of cross-cut (not split) pieces of beef femur at the store. In the past I have bought him smoked (?) pieces exactly like this from pet stores and local butchers and he loves them. I know I can give them to him raw, but I don’t want to keep taking the bone away from him so it doesn’t spoil, and he’s also not as interested in the cold, raw bones as he was in the smoked / prepared bones. The other bones I just left out for him and needed no refrigeration. I want to replicate this as closely as possible with what I have available to me:

An oven
A charcoal grill
A fire pit
Time
A giant bag of bones in the freezer

I am not worried about unattended bone chewing issues, as he is with me pretty much all day every day and also these bones have thicccc walls that he could never actually bite through, or even bite a piece off of, just like the others i have bought him. I am very careful about the bones I give him, I am not here for him choking to death on bone shards, obvs.

I am finding a lot of contradictory information online (how surprising) and I turn to the green for your always more helpful advice.

PS - can i leave raw bones out for him for a few days instead of a few minutes? Is that safe?
posted by ananci to Pets & Animals (8 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Raw bones left out for multiple days will be an inconvenience for you, because they'll attract flies and other critters if you have a yard, and they'll smell bad, but generally they won't hurt your dog. Their stomachs are way better equipped to eat (literal) garbage than ours. Raw bones are also safer for their digestive systems (citing my vet--I'm not an expert) than anything that's been cooked and might splinter.

Is there a reason you can't take away the day-old bone, throw it out, and replace it with a new one? It's what I've been doing with my bone-loving mutt.
posted by garabaarrgggh at 9:28 PM on July 24, 2018 [5 favorites]


Cooking bones is a big no-no as the cooking process turns them into splintery shard-packed time bombs. Raw bones always. Let them reach room temperature or even zap them for a few seconds in the microwave before giving them to doggo, so that they are more fresh-prey-like.
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:32 PM on July 24, 2018 [7 favorites]


You don't list a pressure cooker among your forces, but if you were to pressure cook those bones for 1.5 hours or more at 10-15 lbs of pressure, they would come out of the cooker sterile and much softer than roasted bones.

I have actually eaten beef rib bones cooked this way for 45 minutes or so, and they were still pretty chewy, but not splintery; femurs are much more robust however, which is why I recommend twice the cooking time.

If you handle the sterilized bones carefully, using a paper towel to pick them up and putting them into a fresh ziploc, say, they should last for quite awhile in the fridge unfrozen, and you could follow turbid dahlia's suggestion of zapping them to warm them up before presentation.

Once a pressure cooker has softened them, you could probably chop them up into single day lengths with a good cleaver, but then you'd have to recook them for 20 minutes to resterilize. But I guess it would be simpler to take one away at the end of the day, put it back in the fridge, give him a new one the next day, and then recook all the leftovers at once.

I think this would work best using a trivet to keep the bones up out of the water when pressure cooking them.
posted by jamjam at 11:01 PM on July 24, 2018


Read Jake's bones!

I think you should bury them as your best bet. Definitely don't cook them at all.
posted by flimflam at 2:29 AM on July 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


Don't cook them. At all. Ever. They don't smell for 2 or 3 days anyway.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:12 AM on July 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


I used to give raw bones to my dogs. It would take them an hour or two to strip off all the tissue and lick out the marrow. After that, they don't smell or attract flies and they can be left out. I would occasionally find one under a sofa that had been there for god knows how long.
posted by soren_lorensen at 3:48 AM on July 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


Best answer: Don't cook them. Raw is safest as it helps stop the bones splitting into sharp shards and keeps the bones softer. Once the dog has cleaned them of meat etc they don't really smell, even better if once they've cleaned them up, stick them in the sun for a few days to let the UV do it's thing.

Let the bone warm up to room temp so they have more smell & taste to your dog, or smear them with peanut butter on the first one to get him started. Currently your dog prefers the other bones because that's what he's used to, they're like kids like that.
posted by wwax at 8:11 AM on July 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I know this isn't what you asked but we stopped giving our small year old GSD mix raw bones because he was getting pieces off and eating them and they'd only entertain him for so long. We switched over to yak milk chews and he LOVES them and they last much longer. They're super hard, edible, don't smell and they last if you get good ones. These are the ones we have found last the longest and are the best quality. I know they're pricier than bones but we pay what we have to to get our dog to chill out and give us a break.
posted by emotionalmotionsickness at 5:19 AM on July 26, 2018


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