Squish, can you elaborate a bit on what types of bones to avoid? Are you talking about raw ones? The only kind I give my Springer (a very aggressive chewer) are the plain white boiled ones, quite hard. She loves the knobby ones best (hip joints) but will gnaw on the straight or small round ones as well. Especially when she works on the knobby ones she will break off little bitty pieces, and I think some of them go down the hatch. We haven’t knock on wood experienced any issues so far (and they sure keep her teeth clean), but just thought I’d ask…
anything heat-treated should be avoided- nothing boiled, nothing smoked, no leftovers from a cooked human meal. Heat alters the chemical composition and they become indigestible and more brittle. For example, I often feed raw knuckle bones (the knobby ends from the joints), and the dogs gnaw off the softer joint surface and consume it and digest it. I once was given a smoked knuckle bone and gave it, with misgivings, and had dogs vomiting bone shards and pooping out bone shards, it was not a good situation- smoking renders the bone indigestible. With the raw knuckle, the bone bits that are swallowed turn soft in the acid of the stomach and totally digest.
You should avoid hard weight-bearing bones like cow shanks because even when raw dogs can break teeth on them and have trouble digesting them- the popular “marrow bone” slices from cow leg bones are rather dangerous for a number of reasons, but fortunately most dogs just lick out the marrow and don’t actually chew on them.
Bones from other slaughtered animals, like commercial hogs and lambs, are usually from very young animals and thus tend to be on the soft side, but even from these animals the weight-bearing leg bones have at tendency to splinter into disturbingly sharp fragments. I even avoid feeding the leg bones of large birds like turkeys for this reason.
The raw knuckle bones (bumpy parts from the joints) and antlers are softer types of bone and the dogs can gnaw off small amounts and consume and digest them.
Most dogs who are experienced with eating raw bones won’t swallow large sharp fragments of bone. Most of the vets horror stories are about people who feed cooked/boiled/smoked bones, not raw bones, but occasionally you get dogs new to raw feeding who gulp down the wrong thing, or sometimes you’ll get a dog who just seems to be intent on suicide.
Most people who are feeding raw aren’t trying to give the dog something to gnaw on- they are feeding food intended to be consumed totally, so they feed soft, easily eaten and digested bones. Oxtails, neck bones, rib bones. Small animal bones (e.g. rabbits). Not hard bones from large animals.
