Hi!

I'm new to the forum I've just started feeding my chi raw and noticed yesterday some white bone shard looking pieces in his stools. I'm not completely sure if that's what it was, I'm waiting on some more to inspect!

I was just wondering if bones are meant to show up in his stools or not. I've only fed him chicken thighs with the bone in, all quite thick bones that he really had to crunch up. I obviously don't want to carry on feeding him raw bones if it can hurt him at all.

I'm basically asking what his stools are supposed to look like on a raw diet.

Any help you can give me would be great!

A new to raw dog can pass bone in the stool. Usually not enough to notice. If stools are white and crumbly, that is too much bone. Stools should be firm and small. They will be lighter colored if you are feeding chicken only, sort of light tan. They will be dark and 'normal' looking once you start adding in other proteins.

An entire chicken thigh bone is probably too much bone, depending on the size of your chi. I would back off on the chicken thighs. Maybe try chicken wing tips, any part of a cornish hen (softer, smaller bones), or use the ribs and sternum part of the chicken instead of the legs and thighs.

Be careful not to overfeed. Brody is 5 pounds and typically eats 3-4 ounces a day. That's not very much food at all. Depending on the size of the chicken thigh, you may be overfeeding.

While its fine to be a little bone heavy in the beginning, you are aiming for bone to be only 10% of the diet. So you won't want to feed bony meals all the time. Alternate boneless chicken meat with the bone-in to bring down the percentage of bone.

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Overfeeding can also cause loose stool, so like Tracy said keep an eye on portion size. We just do two "boney" meals a week for our crew!

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This is definitely most likely due to a little too much bone. I made the same mistake at first by feeding lots of chicken wings. Thighs have a lot of bone. Most small Chi's bone needs in a week would be met by one chicken thigh.

Thanks to Tracy's helpful posts, I mainly use cornish hens for bone content and chop it up into 8 sections, as recommended by Tracy. I have much better results using cornish hens and no more bone shards in Onyx's poop.

I also use rabbit for bone content and quail. All are great small bones for our small dogs but cornish hens are easiest to find.

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Thanks sugarbaby!

I don't know what we'd all do here without Tracey's fantastic responses.

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Silly question...what else is a Cornish hen known by?


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I believe they are those tiny young chickens AKA poussin. You can get them in supermarkets but they are rather pricey in the UK.

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trying to find other options for "Bone" type meals for Chi's. I have one that is OK with Chicken and one that is not. I found some Pork Spareribs this weekend that dont look too large. What other options could I try?