Maxwell the Pyr will not touch green tripe to save his life.
Tripe is not what a lot of people think it is. According to greentripe.com, "
Tripe is the stomach of ruminating animals". They didn't say stomach and contents. They also say, "
Green tripe does not necessarily refer to it's color. In this instance it refers to the fact that it has not been touched - not cleaned, not bleached and not scalded. It's actual color is brown, however, sometimes there will be a greenish tint due to the grass or hay the animal ate just before slaughtering."
Even if the contents are in the tripe, what are those contents? It is grass. If is not zuchinni, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, beans, etc. It is grass. If grass were nutritious, cows wouldn't have to eat 16 hours a day. Are there enzymes in tripe? Yes. Enzymes for digesting grass. Not very useful to a dog.
Some people say that dogs eat stomach contents of their prey animals. That is just not so. From David Mech's Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation (2003):
"
Wolves usually tear into the body cavity of large prey and...consume the larger internal organs, such as lungs, heart and liver. The large rumen [, which is one of the main stomach chambers in large ruminant herbivores,]...is usually punctured during removal and its contents spilled. The vegetation in the intestinal tract is of no interest to the wolves, but the stomach lining and intestinal wall are consumed, and their contents further strewn about the kill site."
-p123
"
To grow and maintain their own bodies, wolves need to ingest all the major parts of their herbivorous prey, except the plants in the digestive system."
-p124
David Mech is the world's foremost researcher of wild wolves.
When I feed my own dogs whole rabbits, they will take the stomach out of the rabbit, sissor it open, and shake the contents out before eating it. They don't eat the intestines. They pile them up in a neat little pile beside the carcass.
I didn't teach them to do this. They did it on their own from the first whole rabbit they ate.
To be perfectly honest, I have talked to a few people whose dogs do eat the stomach contents and intestines. Most people I talk to have dogs that don't. As someone said in an earlier post in this thread, tripe won't hurt your dog but as far as I can find out, they are pretty useless nutritionally.