Nutritionally tripe and heart count as meat. Though heart is quite rich, so worth introducing slowly to some dogs who may get too soft out the other end when richer foods are fed.

Spine would count towards the bone content of the diet.

As heart counts as meat, you can feed to bowel tolerance. As stated above, start slowly and build up slowly to find how much your dog can easily take.

If you need to restrict red meats (not sure why?) it may be able possible to source poulty hearts somewhere nearby.

So you would consider that poultry liver is not red meat then?

I know you were not responding to me SB but wanted to add my view. Poultry liver, poultry hearts, poultry gizzards, poultry kidneys [yes, chickens do have kidneys] - all offal but all definitely red meat as far as I am concerned

I have been eating them for as long as I can remember, and now Pereg gets them as well.

I would consider it organ that comes from a white meat source.

I've posted numerious times over the years on here to describe how I feed my dogs, and the defintitions of what is considered meat, organ and bone within the prey model diet that I choose to feed after researching into various ways of raw feeding canines. I've been raw feeding for about five years and this is what I've found works well for my own dogs and for fosters we've had come in over that time.

Bone: As a starting point should make up approx 10% of the diet, I find my dogs do well with about 15%. Some days they get more bone dense meals, the day before or after will be bone free meals, balance over time. By bone in the diet I mean edible bone. Personally I don't like recreational bones like large cow leg bones. Something to carry an animal that big is much denser than my dogs teeth.

Organ: Liver, kidney, spleen, lungs, pancreas etc. Makes up about 10% of the overall diet as a starting point. Half of this figure is recommended to be liver, due to the nutrients it provides. The rest can be made up of the other organs.

Meat: This makes up 80% of the diet. Made up of muscle meat from within the body of which tongue and heart are muscles. Tripe also is included here.

Regarding heart, it is a muscle and nutrionally would count towards the muscle portion of the prey model diet. By rich I mean it's nutrionally dense.

As some dogs are more sensitive than others, it makes good sense to introduce rich or fatty foods slowly as rich/fatty foods can make stools loose. For some dogs their bowels can only tolerate a small amount at a time of such foods, for others they could have a big meal of cow's heart and their bowels can handle it fine. So by bowel tolerance - I mean the amount your dog can eat in one sitting without getting too squitty out it's back end. It's up to each owner to carefully judge this for each meal; as I say, some are more sensitive than others.

I hope that helps to explain some of the terms alot of raw feeders use. If you've more questions on how it works etc there is a [a social network] "Raw Feeding (RF)" group who'd be happy to answer any questions regarding why we feed the way we do.

Thank you so much for your explanation, it explains why there is so much confusion for the beginner when people insist on classifying offal as "other than" meat.

I actually am on several raw feeding forums and find that, like religion, many like to create their own particular "church"

There's a hell of a lot of conflicting info out there when you first start feeding raw. It put me off it that's for certain! Feed this, don't feed this, feed this much of this, no feed this much of it. No, you need this much of it and this much of that. I found it absolutely mind boggling.

Someone told me just to take the plunge, feed liver one meal a week and adjust bone to meat content depending on Rupe's poos. So that's what I've been doing so far. I feed veg (cooked, raw, pureed and whole) because raw feeders can't agree on whether dogs need it or not. I wasn't aware heart was absolutely necessary but I have it in to feed anyway. It was cheap and I can nick a bit off it for my own dinner

To answer OP's question rather than get pernickity over exact definitions - if you consider that raw feeding is often based on what the dog's descendants would eat, it makes sense to feed other offal because this is what they would eat in the wild. They're unlikely to kill prey then just eat the liver, they'll generally eat most of it. So to me it makes sense to provide a variety of offal to cover all of the different vitamins and minerals that each provides, as well as providing a variety of tastes and textures to enrich the dog's diet.

My dog seems very sensitive when being fed beef. He gets inter-digital cysts which do not seem to occur when he is not being fed beef products. A while ago he was on Lamb when he got them and although he has been clear of them for a while and still is; I fed some lamb with chicken recently and he has gnawing and licking at his paws. So have gone back to chicken with a suspicion that red meat is the culprit.
I was thinking more about proteins specific to certain animals, if that makes sense?

As I said I used to try to feed 'a whole animal' as far as possible before; feeding chicken with giblets or chicken and chicken liver, as much of lamb as I could, turkey with neck and giblets....Ideas I had gained elsewhere but made sense to me at the time.

If red meat products affect him then I would have thought that the specific make up of liver from a cow or sheep would be different from, say, pigs liver or chicken liver.

Also, recently I have been relying on minces which include some offal but do not say how much, so I have just been handing him the odd chunk of lambs liver (but as I say, starting to wonder if I should be giving him lambs liver now)

Heart is something I have only really ever fed as a 'treat' as I haven't come across it much.

You are most welcome, always good to clarify where one is coming from.

I don't believe in churches; I'm always happy to hear how others feed and why in order to learn more about raw feeding and always seeking to improve on what I give my own dogs. I'd hate to remain stagnant in my understanding of raw feeding over the years if my methods could be improved apon!

That's interesting. Do you know if the beef is enhanced in anyway? Is it grass raised or intensively farmed? Or could be perhaps a sensitivity to medications given to the cattle.... have you ever tried organic? (Though that would prove costly to feed.)

Are you sure it's def diet related and no other cause? An elimination diet might help work this out. Basically chose one protien source (eg: chicken) and stick to that for a week or two. If no problem occurs, then tick that one off your list and introduce your next protien source, if at any stage problems occur remove the most recently introduced protien and monitor it.

Hope that's of some help to you.

If your dog appears to be unable to tolerate lamb or beef, try him on venison.