Raw rabbit

[skip.knox]

My WIP has a little girl, about 12 years old, out in the woods with only a Roman war dog for company. The dog can hunt and I'll simply posit he's willing to bring back a kill and share it. That's a bit of a leap, but not insurmountable.

But she's got no way to make fire and I don't want to figure a way for her to do so, as smoke is going to attract unwanted attention. So the question of the moment is: what sort of kill might she be able to eat uncooked without getting sick?

The answer "no sort" is acceptable. She's only out in this condition for a couple of days and can survive on nuts and berries. I simply want to know if the raw meat (from whatever sort of animal the dog might bring down) is going to make her sick.

 

[Lace]

Hmm....the raw meat itself wouldn't be the problem, it would be the bacteria or parasites within it. Assuming she has a way to skin the dead animal there would be a pretty high risk of getting at the very least a stomach bug or even a parasite which wouldn't be made known until later. My cousin ate a raw crawfish out of a creek and four months later became extremely sick, turns out he got a parasite from it that settled in his lung. Due to the drastic length of time between eating the crawfish and the symptoms it took nearly a month before the doctors were able to figure out what was wrong with him.

That being said, you could always play a parasite later into the story, she becomes sick weeks or months later and requires medical assistance to rid herself of it. Depending on the climate or where she is located she may have less risk. Salt water fish (which a dog could catch) would be less likely to harbor bacteria or parasites due to the salt, which is why you hear of Eskimos being able to consume raw whale, fish, and seal. Not to mention it's a much colder climate which delays the spread of bacteria. I guess it would all just depend on where your story takes place.

If you really want the dog to bring her food, maybe let her attempt to eat it and decide it's too gross or not worth the effort and give up. She gives the meat back to the dog in disgust and continues on with the nuts and berries. This way you could avoid the whole sick situation.

 

[Malik]

The raw meat will definitely make her sick. The eyeballs and the brains are the safest part of a raw rabbit to eat but even then you're risking a lot. In a modern military survival / evasion scenario they teach us to eat everything and damn the torpedoes, but then we also have the luxury of getting picked up eventually and subsequently shot full of meds to kill every little critter we coincidentally ate.

What would work, though, would be cutting the backstraps and thighs into thin strips across the grain, and laying them on a black rock in the sun or hanging them on a rack in the sun. They'd be jerky after a day or so. The meat needs to get up to about 110F or so for a few hours; totally doable on a warm day. (Remember the meat is dark and will get darker as it dries, so it will absorb heat. On a flat, black rock this can happen really fast.)

Don't leave it out overnight or critters will get it; similarly, don't leave it unattended. Rabbit jerky will be liver-purple and kind of brown when it's ready. (The jerky you get in the store has dye injected into it or has been colored with teriyaki sauce or somesuch.)

Ideally and to be safest, you'd cook the jerky before you eat it. It's very good toasted crispy over a small fire or pounded into dust and boiled in water like bouillon.

The great thing about rabbit jerky is that on a rabbit, the fat is on the skin so when you peel the skin back there's no fat to go rancid in your jerky. It's one of the easiest animals to make jerky from.

EDIT: This is a very, very old way to make meat edible without a fire, and predates recorded history. Most people in a pre-industrial society, even kids, would know this trick.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Raw meat can be safe. We eat steak tartar for example. The important things are bacteria and parasites. Parasites you can't do a lot about without cooking the meat. However bacterial loadings are easier to deal with. Bacteria on a healthy animal are either found on the skin (the skin is there as a protective tegument that prevents among other things bacteria from entering the body) or in the gut cavity (and again the gut cavity acts to stop bacteria from entering the body.) The logic is simply that if you or an animal had bacteria in your body you would have a bacterial infection. You would be sick. If you're not sick than you don't.

If you skin the animal and remove the guts without contaminating the rest of the carcass, the meat should be relatively safe. However if the dogs bitten it you still have the bacteria from the dogs mouth to contend with. And if the dog has bitten through to the gut cavity then the bacteria from there will be spread through the rest of the meat. Also to minimise the risk of bacterial infection you should eat the meat as freshly as possible. Bacteria require an incubation dose to begin making people ill, and that dose is usually at least hundreds of thousands of those bacteria. If you eat the meat fresh then the number of bacteria in the meat will be smaller. Leave it for a few hours and the bacteria will multiply and what was once safe will no longer be.

However with no fire and no means of cooking it I'd still rather look at fruit and root vegetables.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[CupofJoe]

I'd be more concerned with a single dog being able to hunt any sizeable animal.
I've seen small terriers and the like track down rats and mice [so rabbits should be fair game to them]. I heard of [but not seen because its illegal] of Hare Coursing with greyhounds and lurchers [and other speedy dogs].
I'm assuming a Roman war dog is pretty large and stocky and larger dogs usually rely on pack tactics to harry and bring down large prey...
I think I'm in the roots, berries and nuts camp on this one, but it might be a nice moment for the dog to offer it's kill to the girl.
And I have a vague memory of raw rabbit meat being toxic in the long term because of an enzyme it has [or doesn't] that is destroyed while cooking... it was something to do with Arctic explorers...

 

[Terry Greer]

It's largely the lack of fat - a diet purely without any form fat will ultimately lead to starvation.

 

[Terry Greer]

Raw meat is fine to eat (unless it has parasites). Some organs in some animals (such as a polar bear's liver) can be toxic to humans.
Meat can also be 'cooked' by the addition of acids such as lemon juice or vinegar or preserved using brine solutions (as an alternative to jerky in damp climates).
If this is a historic novel (you mentioned a roman dog) they would know probably nothing about the life history of these parasites (most weren't investigated until the 18th or later centuries) so wouldn't care and would just wade in and stuff themselves - dealing with infections as if pronouncements from the gods.

 

[Jesse]

I work for the environmental office at an Indian Tribe. Several Tribal members brought me rabbits they'd killed with black tumors in them. The folks at EPA said that at certain times of the year, wild rabbits can have trichinosis tumors, and that's likely what they are. I would think that would be rather devastating to your little girl, but people have survived trichinosis in the past, so I vote to let her eat it and then deal with some stomach problems later.

 

[skip.knox]

It doesn't have to be a rabbit, I just offered that as an example. CupOfJoe makes an excellent point about the dog, though. A Roman war dog is roughly related to a mastiff, so we're definitely talking a big dog here. He's young, but even young he would have been trained as a fighter, not a hunter.

Which lets me flip the relationship. It's not the girl who's hungry. She can forage. But the dog isn't going to subsist very long on blackberries and acorns.

How would you keep the dog alive? The two have about a week in not-quite-wilderness but no towns or handy abandon farmhouses either. Hills with pine forest. Well-watered, but it's summer. Not to be coy about it, this is 4th century Thrace, between Adrianople (modern Edirne) and Constantinople. After about a week they hook up with an adult who can hunt.

The food isn't really the centerpiece of this little narrative, it's just an aspect that I might work if it proves to be useful. Otherwise, I can fall back on having them raid a chicken coop, steal from a barn, or even rely on the kindness of strangers. That sort of thing.

Oh and thanks to all for the replies so far.

 

[skip.knox]

EDIT: This is a very, very old way to make meat edible without a fire, and predates recorded history. Most people in a pre-industrial society, even kids, would know this trick.

Good to know, Malik. In this case, the girl is a street urchin from Hadrianopolis, so she probably would not know the trick. But that's a useful tidbit to keep in mind for another story.

 

[Malik]

Dogs are scavengers.

I have a 130-lb. American Bulldog, who -- like the Mastiff -- is descended from Roman Molossian war dogs. I have seen him eat dead birds, a mole, half a snake he once caught (I took the other half away from him), a dead crab, a live crab, clumps of old horse****, tall grass, rotten apples, blackberries (he'll rip his mouth and tongue bloody eating blackberries off the vines in the fall), freakishly big spiders, and bees. He has tried to catch fish but hasn't succeeded. He also drinks beer. Of course.

They are not Cockapoos, is what I'm getting at. They are astonishingly tough, suicidally loyal dogs that refuse to acknowledge physical hardship. They stick with you and they make do.

Also, a dog can go for several days without food and then gorge itself on something long dead and then survive for several more days. For eons that's how they rolled. A modern, pampered dog might whine and complain but a dog that was used to scrounging would just roll with it and keep an eye out for the next edible thing.

Bone marrow is very high in calories, so carrying a couple of bones in a pack for the dog would be a good move and would keep it going if it couldn't find anything. My dog can crack a cow femur in a couple of hours and start licking the marrow out. In fact, it's theorized that one reason dogs like bones is that they're a staple of a scavenger's diet because of the high nutrition and calorie content. A bone, a river to drink from, and a half pound of berries and my dog would be insanely happy.

 

[skip.knox]

This deserves more than just a Thanks click. That was excellent information. So good, in fact, I'm going to prevail upon you for a further question. When your dog sits, about how high off the ground are his eyes?

I picture the dog sitting and the girl standing and the two seeing eye to eye. The girl can be anywhere from about ten to twelve, so it behooves me to know roughly how tall that would be in order for them to look at each other on the level.

It's funny, isn't it, how small things like this matter. This is a good example of why I don't fill out those character sheets. Had I done so, Petra would be twelve (or whatever) and that would be that. Instead, a seeming random point, such as how tall a dog is when he's sitting, turns out to drive the age of the girl. And only because I like the image of the two being the same height. They're partners, after all.

 

[skip.knox]

Oh, and scavenging is perfect. I can have the girl driven off the main road, out of the valley and up into the hills, not because of a need for food (they're both good scavengers) but because everyone they meet drives them off because the dog is so danged scary. Which is how the draft is written anyway, before I started wondering how the two were going to feed themselves. It's a good long way from Hadrianopolis to Constantinople, nearly 150 miles, so these two have a bit of a walk ahead of them.

Plus, there's goblins.

 

[stephenspower]

This thread would make for the best potluck menu ever.

 

[Malik]

When your dog sits, about how high off the ground are his eyes?

I picture the dog sitting and the girl standing and the two seeing eye to eye. The girl can be anywhere from about ten to twelve, so it behooves me to know roughly how tall that would be in order for them to look at each other on the level.

My wife is 5' exactly, and 100 lbs. One of her voice students is 14 or 15 and is a little taller than her. Here I've cropped her face, but this was taken yesterday:

When Tor sits his nose is exactly even with her navel.

The Molossers tend to do a "lazy sit" which makes them not as tall sitting down as other dogs their size. They kind of flomp down on one hip.

The "lazy sit" -- I can't find a picture of a Molosser doing it but it's very common. It looks like this:

And if he's sitting normally, resting on his haunches? He's on guard. He's decided something is not right and you'd better hope it ain't you, buddy.

This is his guarding sit, or his commanded sit -- you can see the tension in the rear legs; his butt isn't on the ground.

He's like a lineman in a crouch. From here he can go from 0 to 60 in the space of about five feet. I've seen him knock the guy in the padded suit over from arm's length from this stance. If we're out with him and he takes this sit when we meet someone, we quietly take note. He's a better judge of character than either of us.

If he sits on one hip and relaxes? You're cool with us.

I hope this helps.

 

[Malik]

The final point I want to make is that these dogs were not bred to be aggressive for aggression's sake.

In fact, the Bulldog was bred with terrier to make it aggressive enough to be a sport fighting dog.

The American Bulldog is the original bulldog that came to America with the settlers. The Southern White Bulldogs, like my dog, are direct descendants; the Johnson and Standard lines are modern re-creations and also excellent dogs. My dog is, in temperament and appearance, roughly the same as the working dogs that drove cattle off the ships at Jamestown. Bulldogs were bred with the Pug in England to create a dog with exaggerated features and one that everyone could own; in the States they were bred with the terrier to create various breeds of pit bull for sport fighting.

Most breeders believe that the American Bulldog is still pretty much the same dog that the Romans left in Britain -- a dinosaur among dogs -- and that the Mastiff, Bullmastiff, Rottweiler, and Dogue de Bourdeaux are all descendants bred for different jobs and with local dogs.

Molossers are, by nature, security managers. They assess situations and then decide if a threat needs to be acted upon. That's 90% of their gig.

We trained our dog to attack on command, but also trained him NOT TO attack if we're not around. (Instead he'll "corner and hold" meaning he'll drive an intruder into a corner and not let him leave. He thinks this is BIG FUN, incidentally.) As farm dogs or estate guardians, they will guard the property and the herd -- this instinct was refined to an art form in the Bullmastiff, a dog that rarely barks and rarely bites, but will silently knock an intruder down and sit on him for hours -- and farm bulldogs have been known to bite a rampaging steer on the face and wrestle it to the ground until its temper goes away to keep it from injuring the herd. Again, this translates to an uncanny ability to see trouble coming long before it manifests, but they also have to have the man- and animal-aggression bred out of them (culling the vicious ones) or they're useless. (I don't want to get into a pit bull argument but backyard breeders are a huge part of the problem; some years ago macho idiots stopped killing vicious dogs and started breeding them.)

What I'm getting at is, they have to be trained to attack and then ordered to, and I firmly believe that even in the days of war dogs you couldn't have a dog that was indiscriminately vicious. A dog this powerful -- he broke a coyote's back in a very short fight, to give you a sense of the power, here -- that attacks indiscriminately or ever decides that it is in charge IN ANY WAY has to be put down.

So, yeah. He'd be a good, gentle, sweet dog . . . until it's time to go to work. Which should be a fun dynamic to write.

 

[skip.knox]

Thanks again, Malik. I think Petra's going to have to be more like ten than twelve, and that's fine. It will help emphasize the dog's size anyway. Many thanks for the pics, btw, and for the tip on the lazy sit. I intend to use that; should be easy to write and is one of those small touches I love.

I completely agree about the training of a war dog, though I would add a bit just to see if you agree. I think of them as analogous to medieval war horses, who were also big and trained. Those chargers tended to be spooky and needed a firm hand to keep them in line. Under such a hand, they were magnificent weapons of war, but outside that context they were not exactly warm and cuddly.

This dog is new--the Battle of Hadrianople (which he was lucky enough to miss) was his first real gig--so he hasn't had time to be so highly trained he was unfit for companionship. Moreover, dogs are a closer companion than horses anyway (here Skip ducks from all the missiles hurled by horse lovers), so having the dog (speaking of horses, the girl named him Bucephalus, just because it made me chuckle) ... er, where was I? Oh yes, so having the dog befriend Petra is not much of a leap. It takes him about thirty seconds to decide she's his new pack, so from there out they're best buds.

And yeah, he'll have his chance to show off mad skillz against the goblins.

 

[Trick]

Who'd have guessed that on a thread titled "Raw rabbit" I'd learn so much about dogs...

 

[Malik]

I think that's totally doable. The dog would have an 'on' switch, either a preparatory command or a ritual (armoring up, etc. ) that would change him from pet to weapon. The switch could just as easily be the smell or presence of goblins.

 

[Bweaver414]

The dog could come upon the kill of another smaller animal, such as a fox, and scare the other predator away. He might still bring back the carcass to the girl, and her disgust would prompt her to find berries or nuts.