Do not give your dog pork bones
Recently, someone came into our local shop complaining about a dog that was both vomiting and pooping blood and obviously, this is a less-than-desirable event. This can mean a lot of things some of which include being poisoned. Thankfully this was not the case because when that does happen, especially if it has been a while, there really isn’t a great deal that can be done to help.
I will cover what you can do in that sort of incident at a later time but in this instance this was not a situation of a 3rd party being evil towards someone’s dog, it was a situation where an owner was doing something that they thought was a nice thing, but it turns out it is actually terribly detrimental for this dog’ and all dog’s health (potentially.)
The thing is, your dog is always going to look at your and desire whatever it is that you are eating. This is just how it is, right? I have 3 dogs and if I so much as sit down at a table and start to unwrap something that was delivered that isn’t even food, they will stare at me intently because they want some of whatever it is. Most recently it was a replacement charger for a phone and just as a side note, you shouldn’t feed dogs those either.
Dogs are incredibly resilient animals but there are certain things that throughout time, even long before they were pets, they likely wouldn’t have ever had access to. One of those is cooked or smoked pork bones.
I think most people are already aware of the dangers associated with chicken bones because they splinter when chewed on. But a lot of people will look at their pork ribs after they have had all the wonderful “baby back” bits off of it and think that it looks really solid and perhaps believe there is no way that a dog could possibly chew that in half, right?
Well that is where people are wrong and you are seriously underestimating the power of a dog’s jaw. Also, when cooked, pork bones aren’t as solid as you might be thinking. You may regret it after you try it, but there is a really good chance that your own jaw is strong enough to bite through a cooked or smoked pork rib bone.
The really horrible attribute that pork bones have is that when they do break, it’s not a clean break straight through, it splinters off in pieces almost like a brick would break if you threw it on the ground. These edges can be quite sharp and while your dog will just go ahead and gobble them down, they wreak havoc on their internal organs including stomach and intestines. If you are lucky it will only cut their esophagus but dogs are pretty persistent creatures when it comes to food and they will likely force it down even if it hurts them on it’s path to the stomach.
The major problem with pork bones isn’t just that they are sharp, but that they also don’t normally stay in the stomach long enough to be fully digested, so this sharp bit of “rocklike” substance ends up traveling all the way through the intestines and can and often will cut on its way.
In the case of our dog that was brought to our office, there were cuts in the throat as well as in the intestines and there really isn’t much we can do about it other than wait it out and hope for the best.
Like with most things in dog ownership, prevention is normally a much easier task than the fix and while if someone was truly willing to pay for very invasive surgery for removal of the stuck pork bone, it will normally run is course and the dog will recover. The problem in the meantime is that a dog’s reaction to this is normally to simply not eat, and this can be scary to any dog owner.
So, to recap, don’t feed your dog pork bones and if you have the sort of dog that will get into the trash without your permission, just make sure that they don’t have access to them. In a majority of cases this is just some temporary sort of minor suffering that the dog will have to endure while its body heals itself, in really bad situations, they can suffer for a long time with internal bleeding, end up with ulcers and while it is very rare, they can die from this.
A good rule of thumb is to only give your dog bones that are meant specifically for this sort of thing. We give out certain bones to dogs but these are types of bones, normally lamb shanks, that very few animals on earth have the jaw strength to break.
The Best rule would be to just never give your dog any bones.
Krabi Animal Welfare is a charity run entirely by volunteers and are a registered non-profit organization in Thailand and the U.K.. We aim to relieve the pain and suffering of dogs and cats within Krabi Province.
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