Most of the material was pretty clean, but I'm sure there are a few rodent hairs and some other non gold crud in there, so I'll process it as you suggested.
I can say with total honesty, nothing got processed in my system without first being heated enough to eliminate carbon. I think you'll find that a considerable amount of rubbish will be eliminated from your material. Much more than rodent hair! Your reward will be much cleaner gold, and easier filtration.
Just before the start of October 2010 I put a test sample piece of my teflon fiberglass board in a test tube with what was labeled 2% nitric acid. It wasn't until the end of January that I noticed that the run had finally come loose. That's 4 months! That donut island takes quite a bit longer. This material had .0007 inch thick copper with .0001 nickel and gold plated at 50 millionths of an inch and up.