OX Heart and Lamb Heart

Heya,

As any of you know, I feed my NI puppy the Barf diet (bones and raw food/ biologically appropriate raw food) and I have just bought her her first OX heart.

I intend to fry this ox heart for her breakfast and mix it with kibble, because I worry about the risk of heart worm from beef.

Yet I also would like to feed her lamb heart, should I give this raw or would I have to cook it too?

Also, how many times a week is OK to feed a puppy heart meat?

Im still a relitive newbie to raw feeding.

Cheers guys

kye x

I feed ox heart raw aswell as any other type of heart and have had no problem

I feed heart as part of the meat content in their diet because it is a muscle.

To give some idea of quantity that I feed, I buy in 4kg of ox heart and 2kg of pig heart a month I think to feed my two NI throughout the month to go with the rest of their food and just give it as and when...But I try to spread that out over the whole month.

They both handle a whole pig heart just fine and the ox heart we get in comes whole and I chop it into quite big peices (bigger than the pig hearts) and they have those just fine too. Heart is fairly rich and can give some dogs a bit of a loose tummy so you will get use to how much she can deal with in one sitting...But rather than feeding a load to her like once a fortnight I would spread it out more evenly over the month for balance over time.

You'll get the hang with what works as you go along

Is there a big risk of heartworm from raw ox hearts?

I feed Odi lamb heart raw about once a week on average.

I buy it in 10lb lots from the butcher and get him to mince it (blummin dog won't eat big lumps yet!) and I get him to mix in 1lb kidney and 1lb liver at the same time, because Odi won't eat either raw!

Then my lovely butcher splits it down into 1lb bags so I can freeze it

the only thing I cook, and even then it is very lightly poached, is liver....and that is only cos my lot dont like the texture of it raw.

mine get 1 or 2 lambs hearts a week. raw.

Mo

same here. Most the time I can get away with just chopping it up and mixing with some mince & tripe etc but if theyare on a day where they are having whole items then one of my dogs has to have it a little fried The same dog also adores large peices of ox heart but not pig heart

I don't know of anyone cooking ox heart for the heartworm reason to be honest and had never heard of it being a problem? Hopefully someone else could shed some light on that. If not Kye you can always ask on britbarf

Hi Kye...I saw that you received a good answer on britbarf, it would be great if you could ask permission to post it here so that anyone else who becomes interested can also find out

Yes Myschievious,

Believe it or not, i had just signed on here to post it! lol

Great minds think alike huh


I will post it in amin, just got to sign in first... xxx

This answer was posted to my question on another forum, I think it concisely answers my question and I, along with Myschivious, though that it could be of help to others who have been as misguided as me!

With thanks to Kay Jennings.

Oh, save us from the expert knowledge of butchers!! Heartworm is a parasite
that can infest the heart of a dog; it is passed on through the bite of a
mosquito, it has nothing to do with eating raw beef, or pork, or any other
meat, muscle or heart. Heartworm is virtually unknown in this country as
we're too cold (even in our warmer summers the higher temperatures don't
occur for long enough), though it is found on the continent and in parts of
the USA because of higher temperatures; there have been one or two cases of
dogs coming home from holidays in southern Europe with a heartworm infection
from mossie bites over there, though if proper anti-parasitic measures are
followed as required on return to this country, the larvae should be killed
off before they take up residence.

There is a parasitic infection found in pigs that can be found encysted in
muscle meat, called trichinella, and it was the main reason why it was
always said that pork needed to be cooked thoroughly. Maybe that's what your
butcher was thinking of. It used to be a problem in the days when pigs were
fed pigswill, but nowadays it's so rare that there hasn't been a case in
this country from British pork for 30 years, though there have been one or
two cases from foreign imported pork.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/animalh/dise...richinella.pd\
f
If you're truly worried about this parasite, it can be killed by freezing
for three weeks.