Hollings Filled Bones Natural Dog Treats

Firstly to put your question into context, I spent 27 years in veterinary practice (mostly dogs) before going full time with VioVet. Not once did I come across a dog choking due to trying to eat something. I guess it can happen, but it is so rare you should forget it. There are many things which can go wrong with eating inappropriate items, but choking is a very rare one. Occasionally a piece of "food" can get stuck somewhere eg. bone splinters between teeth, or large pieces which are swallowed but become wedged on their way down. This last category can be deadly serious, but they tend to get stuck much further down, not where they can cause choking. Items doing this are usually not dog chews in fact (large pieces of corn on the cob, raw potato, or other vegetable items in my experience). Dogs were designed to chew up and swallow pieces of bone, hide etc so they are mostly very good at it in fact. Personally I never saw a piece of bone or chew stuck anywhere, although they are known to happen. They are too rare to worry about. Very much more common are health problems due to obesity and dirty teeth in older dogs, so you should keep these things in mind and forget choking. Honest!

Ideally your dogs should have a variety of chews. Some hard like the bones you mention, but others based on cow hide. A large rawhide chew (we sell lots of types) are very good. It should be big enough to take time to chew up, but small enough to be interesting. That brings me nicely to the other point - dogs are becoming obese very commonly now, mostly because people want to feed them and they like eating. If your dogs do not bother with a hide chew, they are probably not hungry enough. If they stay like that, then they will gradually become too fat. Therefore I think that it is a good measure to see if a dog will spend a bit of time with a chew. If not, it is probably over-fed, not hungry and a likely candidate for getting very fat. Modern foods are so good that if dogs are allowed to eat all they want of them, they almost inevitably get too fat. Much better to limit the food, especially when they have finished most of their growing (as yours have).

The point of all this is that the type of chew is not that important. The main thing is that your dogs spend time gnawing/chewing and not just scoffing large quantities of very nice food. Choose whatever takes your fancy and see how it goes. None are at all likely to cause trouble. Not eating chews is much more of a health concern. Sometimes miss a meal and offer a large chew instead. Your dogs will not actually thank you for that, chews are hard work and usually much less tasty than dog food, but then should we spend all our mealtimes eating cream cakes?