That is great Jennifer. What a find!!!!

Ok, I am trying not to be lazy with this but I have just spent the last half an hour reading various posts on my search for raw bones and haven't seen anything regarding leg bones and options for keeping teeth clean?

I am sure they are here but can someone point me in the right direction?

http://www.leerburg.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/ubb/dosearch/topic/0/Searchpage/1

Here is 5 or 6 pages to sift through....I suck at the search function so I am not sure how to narrow it down, maybe someone else has some better suggestions on searching???

Yeap same results I got, I sifted through about 7 pages of that. I could just be blind and not seeing anything :laugh: but I am horrible at searches

I am in the middle of baking cookies, but I stopped stirring long enough to do a google search....try "recreational bone for dogs teeth issues" or a combination....came up with some good stuff...just kind of have to ignore the non-raw stuff.....it is stupid...

http://leerburg.com/feedingarawdiet.htm#recreational

I don't give recreational bones - ever - since my granddog fractured a tooth on one and had to have a zillion-dollar root canal and crown done at Tufts.

Many dogs do great on them, but I don't risk it. If you know your dog is a scraper and not a "cruch this bone OPEN" guy, then you might feel OK about it. (Everyone who says not to let them get dried out, though, is 100% correct.)

You know that the softer bones and the enzymes in the raw meat work very well?

I even have a rescue from last year whose hideously plaque-y teeth not only are not continuing to collect plaque, but are getting clean!

But how are your dog's teeth? I'd go by that. If the dog is collecting plaque even on a raw diet, then I would do something: I would get the gumline-squirty stuff or the fingertip brush with flavored toothpaste*. It's the outside surface that has the problems (because of the relative lack of saliva washing them off), and the outside surface is by far the easiest to clean, with either method.


*C.E.T. is the brand I have. So far, the shrimp-flavored toothpaste has gone over very well.

But I rarely use them; I have them because of adopted dogs usually having horrible teeth when they first come.

 Quote: Jennifer Marshal

Ok, so I should not give them, or just keep an eagle eye on the dogs when they start to get down to the bone? The bones I buy and give have a fair amount of meat on them, and I give them mostly frozen as it slows the dogs down a bit.

So, for driven chewers, whats the option?

I have been leaning towards vertebrea of smaller game like deer, but lamb would be a good size if you want to buy it. With a good amount of meat on them I consider them a meal, not a rec bone.

They are a good shape for teeth cleaning with the dog needing to chew all sorts of ways to get all the meat off. Most of the bone, much of the time all of it, is edible for my dog as well. Though with some of the larger vertebrea I take the hard middle away.

I also feed deer ribs, but stay away from other bigger ribs like cow, buffalo, elk, as my dog does not just strip them, but eats them and I find the large ones very splintery.

I very occasionally do knuckle bones (mostly wild), the odd leg, but when the meat and cartilage is done, I need to take it away promptly. I never do the soup/marrow bones anymore as my dog does not just try to get at the marrow, but wants to break peices off the bone

Oh, now I'm having doubts...

I get Cato a knuckle bone now and again. I gauge the amount of red meat on it to what I would feed that morning...then give chicken feet to counter balance the calcium ratio. Then, I freeze the bone...the next day, I let him chomp away at that, and then give ground turkey or beef with no bone for his meal that night due to the bone he takes in from what's left.

As I said, this is occasional...he seems to be methodical about the bone and doesn't do any heavy cracks or chomps, just a grind like a "givin the dog a bone" grind. I've not thought a thing of it until this thread either!

Carole- ooh! cookies! Thanks for the search, I appreciate it!

The current dog I have, the 8 month old Duke, and the other dogs I pay to feed but are not mine, are all large dogs, with very large teeth.

Most of them do not have any plaque, or very little, the ones that do are older dogs 9, 11, and 12, and are kibble fed. They get Innova Evo mixed with Canidae as the owners, my cousins, and a friend, do not have the storage for raw. One of them still believes that giving raw meat to a dog will make it turn on you. She is a work in progress.

Duke is currently in transition stage from kibble to raw, and he does only gnaw, but with a lot of tenacity. The other dogs are quite dainty about it, all of them are watched and the bones are taken away after about an hour. They are all kept in water if they are thawed out.

I guess I had always thought that the gnawing of larger bones was what kept the teeth clean. I am just glad I never had a dog crack a tooth, now knowing that all these years I've been giving dangerous bones to my dogs

I have a foster here who actually ATE a cow femur piece. I had all the dogs separated into ex-pens in the back yard, but had one more dog than pen, so the one guy was loose in the yard. When I came out to check an hour later, the loose dog's bone was GONE and I found a he had a mouthful of mush. I could not believe it. He did this twice (the first time I thought I must be mistaken, he must have buried his bone). That was the first and last two times I gave cow bones to my dogs.