Dog Owner Wins Her Beef Over Bone Ban

Bethany Knight has a bone to pick with the state’s meat inspectors.

Knight’s mutts, Boy and Girl, like to chew on bones she regularly brings home from the general store.

But when Knight stopped by Currier’s Quality Market a few weeks ago, she was told that a state Agriculture Department meat inspector had ordered the store to stop selling the bones because they had not been inspected and labeled as fit for human consumption.

“They feel they’re protecting us because we’re too stupid not to eat dog bones,” said Knight, an author and consultant who complained in a letter to the editor of the local paper, the Barton Chronicle.

Carl Cushing, chief of Vermont’s meat inspection program, said shortly thereafter that the order had been reversed and that the bones would be allowed back at Currier’s as soon as the slaughterhouse had some to sell.

Cushing called the problem “a simple misunderstanding” and said the inspector should not have ordered the store to stop selling the bones altogether.

“What he probably should have said is if you want to sell bones, you should make sure they’re properly labeled,” he said.

Slaughterhouse bones must be inspected and approved for human consumption in case people want to use the bones to make soup, for example, instead of feeding them to the dog.

The bones “could have come from barrels that weren’t clean. There may have been other contamination on them,” Cushing said. “If they don’t come with a label on them, we can only assume they came from an unapproved source.”

The bones will soon be back for Boy and Girl, whose usual playthings are buried in snow.

“In the winter in Vermont, if you’re a dog, there’s not much to do out there,” Knight said.