I wonder if you can help out with some advice. My nephew produces home bred beef, virtually organic just waiting for the paperwork.
Anyway he has a beef animal slaughtered most weeks and I can have as many bones as I want for free.( He does lambs and pigs as well and i could have those bones if I wanted too) I have as many of you know three Bernese who are fed Royal Canin and green tripe. I would like to add a bit more RMB to their diet. They do get marrow bones from time to time but hopefully I can now get a wider selection of bones. The thing is do I have to make sure they have been frozen before consumption?
I am hoping that if I get my nerve up enough I will go completely BARF but it will take time to feel comfortable with it. The thought of chicken wings fills me with dread the only time I tried them they swallowed them almost whole with one or two crunches, just enough in my mind to splinter them into dangerous bits!!! Apart from the fact that one of them hates raw meat and one is not so keen, the other eats anything not nailed down and with a F in the word...ie Food, so it's not straightforward you see.
I thought less RC and more meaty bones/offal would be a fair compromise, Oh they will eat pulped veg and fruit so I'll give them some once or twice a week. They often have some cooked veg now as I tend to do extra just for them but I will give some raw from now on.
So you Barf lovers is it a good way to start or could I muck the whole thing up like this?
Aileen

I always freeze my beef bones :)

Take it as slowly as you want . all that i will say is try not to get too hung up on getting things excatly right as I have a very relaxed way of feeding my girls and they are thriving on it :D

I always freeze everything.

Beef bones are generally too hard for anything other than recreation, and even then I personally watch closely as after my dog gets through the meat down to the bare bone he will then crunch down hard and broken teeth are likely, so I remove it just before he gets to that bit. He eats all kinds of pork and lamb bones though.

>>I wonder if you can help out with some advice. My nephew produces home bred beef, virtually organic just waiting for the paperwork. Anyway he has a beef animal slaughtered most weeks and I can have as many bones as I want for free.( He does lambs and pigs as well and i could have those bones if I wanted too) I have as many of you know three Bernese who are fed Royal Canin and green tripe. I would like to add a bit more RMB to their diet. They do get marrow bones from time to time but hopefully I can now get a wider selection of bones. The thing is do I have to make sure they have been frozen before consumption?<<

You lucky so and so! I wish I had such a dilemma ;-) Don't know about the freezing, I buy most of mine frozen and what I get fresh is frozen for convenience really.

>>I am hoping that if I get my nerve up enough I will go completely BARF but it will take time to feel comfortable with it. The thought of chicken wings fills me with dread the only time I tried them they swallowed them almost whole with one or two crunches, just enough in my mind to splinter them into dangerous bits!!! Apart from the fact that one of them hates raw meat and one is not so keen, the other eats anything not nailed down and with a F in the word...ie Food, so it's not straightforward you see.<<

You don't have to feed chicken wings, I didn't give them for long for all the reasons you mention and the fact that sometimes there were splinters of bone in their poo! I also had the same problem with one of them refusing to eat anything that wasn't dry food apart from some green tripe:rolleyes: He had no idea what to do with a chicken carcase the first time it was offered and just sat there looking from me to it until one of the others tried to take it and he let them!:rolleyes: I don't think it was that he didn't like it he just wasn't used to such things being offered and didn't seem to understand that he was actually allowed to have it LOL

>> I thought less RC and more meaty bones/offal would be a fair compromise, Oh they will eat pulped veg and fruit so I'll give them some once or twice a week. They often have some cooked veg now as I tend to do extra just for them but I will give some raw from now on. So you Barf lovers is it a good way to start or could I muck the whole thing up like this?<<

Mine have always had veggies and fruit right from when they were pups as well as their puppy food. I spoke to my vet about it and she thought it was a good idea to give them a bit of variety. They were fed raw tripe when they started agility and I was struggling with deef's weight. I changed them completely to raw last April.

I switched mine straight over but you have to do what suits you and your dogs. If you have two that are a bit fussy then taking your time and letting them get used to it may work better. It certainly wouldn't hurt, you may even find that once you start feeding more meaty bones they become a bit more enthusiastic about it all which would make things easier for you :-D

Probably a good idea to freeze (especially pork or beef) first but personally I'd ditch the beef bones other than really big marrow bones for their recreational chewing and go for the lamb any day! Go for the lamb ribs, spines etc... Any non weight bearing lamb bones with a bit of meat left on basically will be soft enough for your Bernese to crunch up and swallow without doing any harm. My Tibetan Mastiff who's about the same size gets lamb bones several times a week along with chicken wings (if you're scared of the chicken bones splintering, freeze them and give one or two as a frozen 'popsicle' so they have to chew them more and crunch the bones up into smaller pieces - mine love these especially in summer). I like to give him a bit of extra meat (in my case, whatever's cheap in Morrisons - beef mince and turkey thigh) and a small amount of liver or heart if there isn't a lot of meat on the bones to stop him having that crumbly white poo. I don't give mine pork as it doesn't agree with them, but many dogs do fine on it.

I feed raw in the morning and complete in the evening.