HE ATE A TURKEY LEG!  WHAT DO I DO?

Dear Jubilee,

Our dog capped off Thanksgiving by stealing the mostly eaten leg of a 20 pound turkey from my son's garbage can. Should I wait until tomorrow or should I give him the metamucil treatment tonight? They couldn't believe he got the can open, because their dog (not an Airedale) has never done it.

Worried in Wiscasset

Dear Worried, 

Several years ago, a vet told me that a continuing education class advised the vets to wait. It used to be that they would take an x-ray, see the bones, and do surgery immediately. What he was told in that continuing ed class was to wait a couple of days because most likely, the bones would dissolve (ie: be digested). So I probably would not use Metamucil. But then, we feed our dogs the raw diet, and bones are a big part of that diet. Not cooked bones, but raw bones. The fear with cooked bones is that they are apt to be more brittle and might splinter or get stuck going down the throat and digestive track and cause some kind of damage. But given how quickly bones disintegrate in the stomach acids, I suspect that the biggest danger from the more brittle cooked bones is in a puncture wound before the bone gets to the stomach. Once it gets to the stomach, I suspect that it isn't going anywhere else and that when it leaves the stomach, it will no longer look or act like a brittle bone!
 
I would give him until tomorrow to digest the bones, and then I probably would start the metamucil so it would coat anything that had not digested and give it a safe ride to the other end.

Jubilee 

[Follow-up]. Worried in Wiscasset wrote back a week later that they waited a couple of days, nothing happened, and they stopped worrying.