Chicken Bones

These are our two mostly-beloved dogs, Kody and Joey. Kody is the handsome one, being hugged by David. (Kody doesn't like to hold still for pictures.)












As responsible pet owners, we try to care for Kody and Joey as well as we can, although the level of health care available for animals in Honduras is pretty low.

One thing we can do, to help protect the health of our dogs, is to keep them from eating chicken bones. Chicken bones can splinter inside the digestive tract, causing significant damage.

So, when we eat chicken, we throw out the bones rather than giving them to our dogs. Unfortunately, we've found that putting the bones into the bags with the rest of the garbage pretty much guarantees that when we put out the trash, the neighborhood dogs will rip open the bags, scatter the garbage, and eat the bones.

We know that Honduran dogs generally eat chicken bones a lot (they aren't usually fed much by their owners), so we don't feel too bad about our solution to this problem: we dump the chicken bones at the edge of the street in front of our house, knowing that the neighborhood dogs will clean them up for us.

So, basically, we are denying our own dogs this much-desired treat, and instead feeding it to the strays.

One important reason we have these two large dogs is for security. So far, we have not had any intruders onto our property, and we know that having large dogs makes it less likely that we will have this problem in the future.

I wonder, however, what might happen, if the situation should arise when we do experience a need for the dogs to protect us. Will they turn to us at that moment, cock their heads to the side, and say, "Now, can we talk about those chicken bones . . .?"