Above my pay scale.

[Robbie]

I have a close friend who also feeds raw to her dogs, she got a 10 lb bag of gizzards. They needed cleaning. She tried a few but decided it was too much work, so she gifted them to me........
They were stuffed, packed to the brim with some kind of strange feed- all bright turmeric yellow with what looked like buckwheat, hay, cantaloupe seeds, the odd feather.............. I mean, STUFFED.
I did around 20 and decided that I, too, would bail. Unbelievably gross. I don't know what was worse, cleaning and cutting up tripe , or cleaning out these gizzards. I think that inner skin could be used in bu llet proof vests instead of Kevlar.
The tripe certainly smelled worse but the food in the gizzards.............

I now have new respect for those poor b*stards that work in slaughter houses, cleaning gizzards. Thankfully there will be only one gizzard, when I get around to processing my own chicken. I plan on doing one at a time, a couple of days before dinner. And although I will feel very sorry for it, it will get no food for 12 hours before hand.
Note to admin: Perhaps we could add a processing section?

[WLLady]

Processing forum in on the farm......

[windwalkingwolf]

Sounds like meat chicken (Cornish x) gizzards. The yellow is from bile, produced in quantity in a vain attempt to digest as much as they eat. And, they eat everything. It's what they do. They don't have the 'off' switch in their brain that tells them when they're full, so they think they're starving. They will eat so much that some of it comes out the back end looking the same as when it went in. Hatchery to table in 4 weeks :/

[Robbie]

That explains it, most of the stuff in there did not look like chicken feed.

[Dominion Link]

Coyote bait pile....

[Robbie]

Coyote bait pile....

Not here.

[Chick-a-roo]

I pull the feed from my meats 12 hours prior to processing to empty their intestines. However, there is sometimes still food in the gizzards and in the lower colon. I am thinking I may need to pull food a full 24 hrs before processing but leave water down.

On another note, when feeding raw to the dogs, why not just leave the gizzard intact? Just curious... I thought the whole idea of feeding raw was to give the dog what they would get in the wild, in which case would be whatever is in gizzard/intestines/stomach et al?

[Robbie]

Chick-a-roo I don't know if the chickens were given medicated feed or what they were eating.
There are different theories about feeding raw, I don't exactly follow the whole prey theory- at least the type where people just throw a carcass for the dogs to gnaw on. Dogs can and do get sick from bacteria in raw (plenty or dogs get sick from salmonella) food and certainly parasites, and humans can certainly catch stuff from the dogs and if the meat isn't handled properly. Some of those completely antibiotic resistant bacteria lurk on raw meat. I don't give my dogs intestines or stomachs, to minimize the risk somewhat. They do get frozen beef tripe mixed in their organ cubes (comes that way) but it's a risk, they can get Neospora if the tripe/meat hasn't been frozen long enough or cold enough. I don't give them long bones either, I shudder when I see people feeding whole turkey wings and chicken legs to dogs. It's a myth that cooked bones splinter and raw bones don't, raw bones splinter just fine and to me it's roulette giving dogs that stuff. I will feed small turkey necks, that's the only whole meat they get with bone in it. Everything else is ground. It took me a long time to come around to feeding raw, but when I compare the risks from feeding kibble, a totally inappropriate food, vs. raw the raw wins hands down. I wish I'd done it sooner.