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....This will be a regular part of his diet now. I still skeeve the raw chicken and worry about getting salmonella if he licks me (he loves to give kisses!), but I'll work around all this,....

A perfect opening for something my training club was discussing last week.

Face-licking and kissing aren't great things to encourage, I'm afraid.

I have fed raw for a long time, and my ideas about this predate raw's popularity by years.

It's a food-begging mechanism from puppyhood, and probably isn't a great behavior to allow, period, into adulthood.

And dogs almost all do some rectal licking (and a lot make seriously intimate contact with other dogs' poop! <img src="http://www.leerburg.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />, so even dogs fed cooked-to-sterility commercial food might not be the best kissing partners.

Raw food is the least of the issue, IMHO. <img src="http://www.leerburg.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

P.S. Before you know it, you'll be feeding all raw........ and it started with one chicken wing! If you can get some chicken backs, they're wonderful (with kind of soft, chewy bones).

Good luck, and good work! <img src="http://www.leerburg.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

call all the supermarkets' meat depts. and butchers in town and ask if they can get you chicken necks by the case lot. (it isn't something they normally carry, so you have to order it.)

chicken necks are the very best place to start. they are very bland and the bones are very soft.

Can dogs get salmonella from chicken, or is that just a human affliction?

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Can dogs get salmonella from chicken, or is that just a human affliction?

Salmonella is everywhere. Dogs can "get it" from commercial foods, people can "get it" from unwashed produce, etc.

Dogs are scavengers who get away with eating partly-rotten animal carcasses (and worse) because they have a much different digestive system from our own........ theirs is short, and the tainted food (if it is tainted) generally swoops through without lingering and infecting the intestines the way it can ours. A dog processes raw food in about 1/4th to 1/3rd the time it takes them to process kibble.

This is why we are advised not to mix kibble with raw, btw, so we don't force raw foods to stay in the system for the unnaturally long time the kibble does.

http://www.njboxers.com/faqs.htm#salmon

If you "search" here on this forum, too, for salmonella and/or e.coli, you'll find exhaustive and detailed explanations of why dogs (who have, after all, evolved eating raw prey, and have only very recently had to eat processed, over-cooked, eternal-shelf-life commercial kibble) don't have the same results as humans from ingesting tainted foods.

Thanks so much. You have all been really helpful.

Hi Folks,
Well it is me again and a new thing has come up. Max is fully into his teeth coming in and doing pretty well. We did manage to find a source for Chicken backs and necks here locally so that is a very good thing. A new thing has come about since Max had come into full teething, for some reason he no longer wants to eat his RMB's. He will eat his organ meat no problems, but when we put down either Chicken necks or backs, he just kind of walks away from them. I did the other day get him to at least eat one serving but I had to hand feed him that as he would not just eat it. He is now 20 weeks old and weighing in at a little over 40 lbs so he is doing okay as far as his weight is concerned, I am just a bit concerned that with him not eating his RMB that he is not getting the right ratio of calcuim at this time. Do you all think it is a good idea to maybe give him some sort of calcuim supplement, at the present time, he gets kelp, alpha and salmon oil every day as well as all the recommended things that should go along with a RAW diet. Or should my wife and I just wait him out and only put down the bones until he will eat them. He is not very food driven at all and will surely walk away from food ( at least he will work for his treats). To kind of help Max through this time my wife and I are giving him crushed ice in a towel and he will chew on that but really does not chew on a whole lot of other things, well that is if you do not count my wife and me... LOL
Do any of you think that maybe giving him his RMB frozen may be of some help.
As a side note, he will now lick a Kong and eat cream cheese out of it, really does not chew on the Kong a lot but at least I can see real progress with his little tongue. Still has a whole in it about 1/4 to 2/3 of an inch but he is now at least licking things.
Thanks for any help that you may be able to provide.