Ahhhhhh welcome to the wonderful world of butchery!
Ok, soooo... the bits you want to try for meals, are things that have a similar proportion of meat to light, non weight bearing bone as a chicken wing would have... certainly, no more meat than that.
Some people feed chicken necks and beef/ox tail - try it, I have found a couple of my dogs will vomit up little bones and then we have a scrummage for who gets to eat it again
so I avoid those, but I do have a particularly weak stomach and vomit and bones really sets me off. Try it out if you find yours do tend to bring back spare bits, then leave them out in future. (BTW, the dogs system is well designed to cope with eating something THEN deciding if it is in fact edible, and then bringing it back if either it isnt, or it needs a little 'rearranging'.., very much unlike ours! so vomiting up stuff is not a crisis!).
You can feed the odd meal that does not contain whole bone, so if theres cheap cut up meat going or cuts where you wouldnt feed that particular bone but would cut the meat off... thats fine. If you have one and can stomach it (and I do, but i cant), those old fashioned cast iron mincers everyones Grandma used to have, the kind you clamp to the table and wind the handle round... those can handle some stuff. However you need the matching cast iron stomach to stand grinding up stuff wtih bone in it.... one chicken wing was enough for me and i was heaving for hours!
Worth a go if you have one you can turn reduced priced pork or lamb chops into dog food - handy if you buy them for yourself, forget about them and then you have that 'hmmmm is this still good or does it whiff a bit... im not sure' moments. If you arent sure that if its still good or if its off, and wouldnt eat it yourself your dog still can. (Whereas if you definately ARE sure its off, whilst your dog probably could and would, I wouldnt advise it!).
Dogs can eat fish, I have not found my dogs to do so well on whole raw fish (and that can contain parasites where modern farmed meat these days does not, which was btw, the old reason for not feeding pork... does not apply now!).... I think the scales is what makes them vomit it back up, but im not sure and i HATE fish so theres no way im risking them vomiting up fish.... I hate vomit too and fishy vomit...... bleeeeeeeeeeeurgh.
I do feed canned fish, pilchards in tomato sauce or pilchards in oil though and these go down a treat and never come back up!
Try stuff and see if your dogs like it - as long as they have the hang of chewing stuff and you supervise them, the risks are lowwwww, obviously dont throw them half a cow and then go out all day, that would be daft!
Poultry - I find turkey is quite fatty and goose even more so. Turkey makes my dogs fart ... the kind of wind where you turn around expecting a big green cloud or even start hunting for the poo!... So go easy on that, it does no harm... just feed that if you are going to go out later on, or will be taking them out in the fresh air. Not someting to feed say, the morning of a loooooooooong car journey - eek trapped in a tin box with a farty dog!
If you like turkey or goose, or whatever else you might come across, you can always take off the breasts and legs for yourself, and then divide the frame up for the dogs (if its a big bird, if its something small then a frame each for the dogs) - sometimes I find that chickens, turkeys etc are on sale or reduced in the supermarket and I am not really a fan of big roasted dinners so we take off what we want and the dogs have the rest.
If you have anywhere that supplies game or anyone who does pest control and shoots rabbits, then you can feed that too - any wild food, freeze it (Nettle will know how long for) first for a while (i think a week or two!) to kill parasites, but you can feed things like rabbits whole if you like. Be prepared for whole foods like a whole or half a rabbit to take a while to eat, and some dogs like to treasure such things and bring them indoors... As I discovered the day I found that Dill had stashed the head, spine and back legs of his rabbit IN my bed... (And my friends dog Ty nearly gave his Mum a heart attack when he brought his indoors and 'sat it up' at the bottom of the stairs as if it had come back to life. Gah, dogs that play with their food...
).
There is also a wonderful story somewhere on the net, about a lady who went, with her small dogs, to pick up an elk carcass, at least I think she set out to get it and take it home to cut up for her dogs... she may not have. Her dogs spied it... and GOT INSIDE IT and would not come out. She had to load the carcass with the dogs inside it, into her truck ... bring it home and put it in the garden.
Here it is!
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/j ... inelk.html
Enjoy!
I know that you said lamb was safe, but the first store we went to didn't have it, neither did the second, and the third was more than I spend on my own meats for my own dinners. And I do love my dogs, but...
