A lesson in the importance of bone.

I learned a valuable lesson this week in the importance of bone-in meals.  Mona's main source of bone is chicken.  Specifically, leg quarter pieces that she eats about 3 days a week.  We were low on chicken but had lots of venison and pork, and since I was pretty busy this week I kept putting off buying more chicken.  This meant she ate a lot of venison and pork, probably 4 or 5 days straight.  So, Sunday she woke up at 4am (and again at 8am) with watery stools.  Immediately realizing my mistake, I gave her a bone-in chicken thigh that afternoon.  I'm not sure how long it takes for the bone to "kick in", but the watery mess continued ALL. DAY. LONG.  She was asking to go outside constantly, and even had an accident that evening.  I like to think that, since she couldn't hold it, she at least knew to aim for the linoleum and not the carpet.  :)  Again this morning, she woke up at 3am again at 6, with no improvement.  

Mona will eat another bony chicken meal today, probably tomorrow too, and hopefully that will help get us back on track.  And I will never again slack on buying chicken if it is time for a bony meal!!

Country-style ribs.

A while back I'd gotten some pork country-style ribs.  Turns out it's just pork shoulder with bone, sawed into strips.  About half the pieces ended up being boneless, the other half had sawed slices of shoulder blade in them.  I'd weighed them, bagged them, and frozen them before I learned that the cut shoulder bones in several of the pieces were dangerous to feed.  I didn't really care to thaw it all out, cut out the bones, and re-freeze it all, so for a while I just picked out the boneless pieces and fed those.  The other night I finally thawed a chunk with some bone in it and cut the bone out before I fed it.

Today, though, I decided to see how Mona would do.  I'd read that cut pieces of bone could be a choking hazard, but also read from owners of more cautious eaters that they fed country-style ribs with no problem.  So I picked out the cut with the biggest piece of bone, and cautiously handed it to Mona.  I watched her like a hawk, but she did wonderfully!  She chomped up that bone into nice swallow-able pieces and didn't rush it at all.

What does this matter?  Well, I don't intend to feed Mona sliced bones very often.  I realize that regardless of how carefully she eats, it is something to feed with caution.  Most likely I will feed these last few pieces of "ribs" to her, carefully, and then cut out any sawed bones from future meals.  But it does really get me thinking that she would enjoy some larger meals... It took her a lot more work to eat that piece of shoulder, and it seems to me there must be some extra satisfaction in that.  So, I'll be keeping my eye out for larger meals that she can work on for several days!