I am very interesting in switching to raw; I've read a lot on this site and have a few different books on all natural and raw feeding, but I have a concern for my situation.

Perhaps some of you may remember my aggression issues with my german shepherd, 3 y/o now. They were especially bad around his food bowl, until I got with the program and stopped messing with his food! (He's doing GREAT, BTW, in the aggression department.)

My concern is he still gobbles his food insanely fast (he eats in a corner of the kitchen and no one is ever present- he's left right alone.) He's also on a bit of a diet as he's gained weight since decreasing his activity from the CCL tear. I have been slowly giving him raw chicken and hamburg, along with various veggies at times, and yogurt, but I'm worried about giving him anything with bones, for fear he'd almost literally inhale and choke on a whole bone. However, in my reading, it seems like just feeing meat without bone is not a good idea. Any suggestions? Or even links where this has been discussed (I have limited computer access now, but I haven't been able to find any.) Thanks!

Stephanie, start with chicken backs, and if it makes you feel better you can partially cut through the back so that it is a little more flexible. You could do that with legs too.
My dog doesn't waste any time eating either, and with raw she generally will give a crunch or two, and then swallow it down.
Plus, chicken is pretty slippery, and slides down the throat easily...

Of any of the posts here that I've read about, what I recall is that if the piece of meat/bone is too large, the dog will hurk it back up.
I recall only one post where a dog actually choked on a raw bone, and it was a small dog who choked on a beef rib bone...

If you are going to switch slowly, remember that kibble and raw digest at different rates, so do not feed at the same time.

Three of my four are gulpers, so I know the feeling---it took me a long time to stop cringing when one would swallow half a chicken wing in a single gulp. But here's what I've come to realize: dogs don't have molars to grind food to a pulp in the mouth---they only need to reduce food into hunks that they can swallow, and the digestion happens in the gut. If a dog can swallow the hunk of raw food (and it gets all the way to the stomach) it's fine. Anything that won't go down comes back up for further chewing.

You have two solutions that I see: either give pieces of RMB that are too large to swallow whole (i.e. an entire chicken leg quarter, which would have to be at least bit into two pieces to swallow)...or chop food into pieces that can be swallowed whole without any risk of choking.

Some people feed one meal a day--and if so, you could offer a quite large piece of carcass that would absolutely require chewing. No way a dog could swallow a half a chicken whole, or an entire rabbit or turkey drumstick.

I've also heard of people feeding RMBs frozen which would slow down chewing.

To start with, you can also try hand-feeding a large RMB (again, like a whole chicken quarter--hang on tightly to your end!) to encourage the dog to gnaw on it, discovering the bone in there and the pleasure of chewing. If he's only ever had boneless meat, he may not "get" the idea of bones in there.

I suppose a third option is grinding.