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Dog Chews
Posted on April 6, 2010
Thanks to the discussions we had lately on my facebook page I have done a little experiment with dog chews. Nothing that requires a lab, just my dogs and many different kinds of dog chews. My goal was to find one that is no health concern, is not mainly made of fat, one that the dogs like and keeps them busy for longer than 5 minutes. Preferably longer than 10 minutes, too. And that is no easy feat! At least if you disregard a filled kong or a nylabone, which I both love and are my first choice, but I also like to give my dogs something… organic you could say, I guess.
A little background on why I even started this: The common dog chews you can find in most local grocery and pet stores are rawhides, hooves, bones and pig ears. All of which are not necessarily the best products for your dogs to digest or chew on. I won’t go into detail but in general I’d like to warn you that raw hides can obstruct your dog’s bowel by expanding, if they are cheap and not made from one piece they can splinter and basically tear their guts. Hooves and bones, although I like them, are supposed to be too hard for them, so they can chip a tooth and pig ears are mainly fat.
So I ordered a load of “healthy chews”, which you can get from places like k9cuisine.com or sitstay.com
(and no, I don’t have any affiliation with sitstay other than I like them). They are mostly dried muscle or tendon. I orderd cow ears, bully sticks, braided bully sticks, twisted bully sticks, spiral flossies (tendon), and bully springs. Unfortunately quite a lot of other things I wanted to try are out of stock in several stores. Like I wanted to try achi
lles tendons or lamb pizzles. Anyway, so all of these products usually have a description that tells you the size of them, but even though I read them 6 inches on my ruler looks a lot bigger than some of the six inch chews I got. My bad, I guess. Just let me tell you, if you have a 50lb. dog, you probably don’t want to get the 6 inch chews. I hardly have to make any differentiation here, almost all of them were gone within minutes that I gave them to my dogs. I’d actually love to hear other peoples experiences, because maybe I have some crazy chewers on my hands, but I don’t think so. I think my dogs are pretty average. They go to town on a rawhide but they don’t destroy a KONG. That is my definition of average.
So out of all of these chews there is only one that I will order again. It’s the normal bully sticks. I think they lasted at least half an hour and those where the 6 inch one. So my conclusion: I am going to stick with Nylabones, KONGs and the thickest and longest bully sticks I can find 
(Pictures courtesy of sitstay.com)
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