… or does it???<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One day I was eating some chicken, outdoors, somewhere in Africa, with a colleague I had been living with for a few months and two brand new visitors, Dick and Jane1<\/sup> from the US. After cleaning most, but not all, of the meat off a leg bone, I tossed it to Hozi the Cat, who eagerly grabbed it and took it behind my chair to munch it down.<\/p>\n Jane, lunging at the cat, “No, no. No!!!! She’ll die, she’ll choke to death!”<\/p>\n The cat moved behind a different chair, with half the bone, the other half already having been munched down.<\/p>\n “Oh, don’t worry, I feed her all the chicken bones. She can’t choke on them. She’s a cat. Her mother also ate all the chicken bones, ’till she was killed by that rabid dog<\/a>. Her daddy was a wild cat. He’s probably watching us right now from the jungle while he munches on some bones.”<\/p>\n Looking around, still scampering after the cat, “Cats can’t eat bones, they choke on the splinters.”<\/p>\n “No they don’t. It’s never happened,” I said. Yes, I admit, I was taunting her.<\/p>\n “I know a cat that did!” she yelled, following the cat, still dragging its bone, behind the dish drying rack next to the baraza.2<\/sup><\/p>\n “Name?”<\/p>\n “What?” said Jane, now following the cat to it’s place next to my chair. It’s bone was all eated and it wanted another.<\/p>\n “What was the name of the cat that you saw choke to death on a chicken bone before your very eyes, Jane?”<\/p>\n “Well, I didn’t see it. It was, I think, my cousin’s cat.”<\/p>\n “What was it’s name? I said sternly, “If you don’t know its name, you don’t know it existed, and if you don’t know it existed, you don’t know it died from eating a chicken bone.”<\/p>\n Jane fell silent, despondent almost. I dropped a mess of wing bones in front of Hozi. She eated them all, and did not die. Later, she ate the backbone.<\/p>\n I’m not going to try to tell you that dogs don’t die from eating bones, because a) there are too many dog-symps out there who believe that they do and b) for all I know they do it all the time. Dogs are probably too domesticated to trust doing what millions of years of evolution has prepared them for (eating the bones). Not that I can name a single dog that died of eating a bone. Maybe you can. If you do, though, make it real. You have to have been in the house where it happened and you have to have seen the dead dog and heard the vet say that it really died of choking on a bone. That is not too much to ask. Real evidence, not just that you heard about it or that you believe it must have happened. X-rays of the bone in the throat.<\/p>\n