Lites, anyone use them

my butcher has offered me some and i have searched but cannot find much info, good source of RAW or a step too far.

Lights are lungs - and yes raw feeders do use them! It's just that they are usually not so easy to get. Many years ago when I had ferrets I raw fed them (no choice as this was before the advent of ferret food) and I was lucky enough to get a good supply of bits for them, most of which was lights.

My butcher seems to be able to get them, he is giving me a large bag tomorrow, so i will see how it goes, thanks for the info.

Yup, lights are lungs, my two have a bunch in their order this month (I order mixed pig offal which is usually all sorts minced up but this time I got a bag of whole lungs) and seem very keen.

Do lights count as offal (as liver & kidneys) or as muscle (as in heart)?

I got lungs for Jake. The first few times he got them, he ate them fine... Now he refuses! So I just stopped getting them. My butcher was good at getting them too.

Offal I believe. The way I heard it explained somewhere was that offal is sort of the vitamin supplement of the raw food world - organs that have specific jobs in the body need certain enzymes etc. to do so, and therefore their makeup is slightly different to muscle meat. The heart doesn't really work like other organs, it's just a big muscle that contracts and relaxes mostly to pump the blood, so it counts as muscle. Everything else generally counts as offal. I think feeding a variety of offal is better than just liver, for example, because each seems to offer different nutrients. E.g. comparing these two pages, lung has a lot more Vitamin C than liver (though liver has loads more Vitamin A), more potassium - just varying amounts of each things so you're more likely to provide everything the dog needs by giving a wider variety. Not the mention the mental stimulation of different textures and flavours.

Thanks krylr.... so where does that leave tripe...?

I would say tripe is muscle. When I get it from Smithfield it's a whole stomach and you can see it's a huge sheet of muscle that looks like a rubbery white carpet bag.

I personally feed it as a muscle meat (because as Maxine said, texture-wise it's more like muscle) but understand that it's got more nutrients in it because of the partially digested food in it (uncleaned tripe, that is). That's why lots of prey model-type feeders use it as a sort of vegetable replacement.