PAUNCH MANURE FOR HEALTHY CARNIVORES

In our compost operation we accepted all clean organic waste. We got paunch manure from a slaughterhouse. Paunch manure is what dumps from the stomach and intestines, the food that the animal had eaten that day and not yet passed out as manure. This stuff makes excellent compost. It is full all types of beneficial microbes and enzymes.

Our dogs and all the dogs from neighbors quickly learned to come and eat from it. Soon the coyotes found it and they to came and had a feast.

We had three big dogs. The oldest always had bad skin problems, with a bad odor, the vet said to feed the dogs some fat such as lard and tallow. It helped some but the fleas and ticks and bad odor on the old dog remained. Our family never had money to spend on dog doctors. However our old dog started smelling better, soon his coat was healthy and shiny then we noticed neither he nor any of the other dogs had fleas or ticks. Then neighbors were telling us their dogs that ran loose no longer had fleas. We all thought it must be the weather or the season.

I was giving a talk at a college. On soil and health when a M.D. told me a story how a Zoo cured their sick carnivores by feeding them paunch from rumen animals on a tip from an old hunter that noticed that in the wild when a carnivore killed an herbivore they always ate the gut first. I have also listened to ranchers tell about eagles killing baby sheep in the late winter and only eat the gut and they believed the eagles were after some vitamin or other nutrient that was in the stomach of these herbivores

I got to think back and realized the ticks and fleas and other canine problems disappeared when we started using the punch in the compost. We got our proof when we opened a new compost yard miles away and took paunch for composting and the dogs in that neighborhood cleaned up slick and shiny and all fleas and ticks disappeared. Coyotes and other wild meat eaters also visited the fresh dumped paunch each night. We didn't catch and inspect any of the wild critters but they looked awfully healthy and happy.

Malcolm Beck