Do Any Natural Chews Clean a Dog's Teeth? What the VOHC List Shows

Chewing a dried stick scrapes soft plaque off the tooth faces it touches. That is real and mechanical, and it is not brushing. No natural chew of any brand carries a VOHC seal, ours included — and that empty row means untested, not failed. Your dog finishes a stick, you see a wet white tooth, and it looks like something happened. Something did. Just not that.

That's a strange thing for us to publish on a site that sells bully sticks. Here's what the list holds, what its seal is measured against, where the 85% figure came from, and what your dog is doing to a tooth all that time.

What the VOHC list actually holds

The Veterinary Oral Health Council keeps one register of dental products it has accepted for dogs. The copy we pulled was last updated in November 2025. It holds 75 products across six categories — dental diets, rawhide chews, edible chew treats, water additives and gels, brushes and wipes, and one professional sealant.

Thirty-six of them are edible chew treats, the names you'd know from the shelf. Greenies, Dentastix, DentaLife, WHIMZEES, VeggieDent, OraVet, Milk-Bone Brushing Chews. Each one is a formulated product with a recipe and a factory behind it.

Now search the same document for bully, pizzle, collagen, tripe, tendon, trachea or antler. Zero hits, all seven words. Not one single-ingredient dried chew is on it, from any brand, and a bully stick is one beef pizzle, dried and nothing else.

What the seal is measured against

The seal isn't a prize for clean teeth. It's a pass mark on one particular trial — and the Council doesn't run that trial. Its own line on this is flat: the VOHC does not test products itself. Manufacturers submit data, and the Council reviews it against a published standard.

That standard is public too. Under the VOHC trial protocol, a chew has to cut the plaque or tartar score by 15% in each trial, average 20% across the two, and clear p<0.05 both times. The control group eats dry food and nothing else. Read that last line twice.

A sealed dental chew has beaten dry food. Never a toothbrush.

An empty row isn't a failing grade. It means nobody has run the trial — which is a different sentence from nobody could pass it.

Why no natural chew has been through it

Two feeding trials, a scorer blinded to the groups working through a designated set of teeth in every dog, cost real money. A brand pays that when there's a formula to defend and a claim to print on the bag.

A dried muscle has no formula. Nothing in it can be tuned or patented, so the trial buys whoever funds it almost nothing a rival can't copy by Friday. That reading is ours, not the Council's. Either way it leaves one honest word for every natural chew on the shelf, ours included: unmeasured.

The 85% figure, and where it came from

One number gets quoted in this category as though it settled the question: chewing a bully stick is 85% as effective as brushing. Follow it back and you arrive at one undergraduate paper, written for a General Microbiology course at Rutgers-Camden in 2014.

Six dogs took part, four of them in the bully stick arm. Mouth swabs before and after were cultured and the colonies counted: raw bone 79.0%, brushing 70.3%, bully sticks 60.2%, a VeggieDent chew 54.6%.

Now put the spread beside that third number. The bully stick result carries a standard deviation of 29.8 across four dogs — half the size of the figure itself. The paper's own verdict on all four results is one line: none of the treatments were statistically different, at p=0.330.

So where's the 85%? Divide 60.2 by 70.3 and you land on 85.6%. That last step is ours: the paper never takes it, and nobody quoting the number says where it came from.

It also counted a different thing. A gauze swab picks up whatever will grow on a plate that week. The VOHC trials score plaque and tartar on the teeth. Two measurements, one word.

What chewing does do

Something worth having — and the Council says so on that same page. Its advice to owners runs: the gold standard is brushing, and daily chewing activities can also be effective in maintaining oral health.

That's a mechanical effect, not a medical one. A dried chew is abrasive. Your dog pins one end with a paw and works the other along the same few back teeth, and soft material comes off the faces the chew touches. None of that is your dog's plan. They're trying to finish it.

Which makes duration the variable, not flavor. A stick your dog inhales before you've sat down does none of it — so match the length to your dog, and the thickness to how hard they work. Every bully stick size we make sits together in all bully sticks, from short bites to twelve-inch jumbos, and four checks worth running covers what else to look for.

Where the damage actually happens

Cornell's Riney Canine Health Center puts 80-90% of dogs over three at some component of periodontal disease — and notes it's worse in smaller breeds.

The culprit isn't the brown stuff you can see. Cornell names plaque, an invisible bacterial film laid down above and below the gum line, and puts the real trouble underneath the gums.

No chew reaches under a gum. That's geometry, not an opinion about chews. It's also why daily brushing with a veterinary paste is what Cornell calls the mainstay of a home dental program, and why a bright-looking tooth tells you less than you'd like. In a small breed, the clock starts earlier.

What to watch at chew time

Hardness is the other tooth question, and it isn't this one. Whether a chew can crack a molar has nothing to do with whether it cleans anything, and the honest answer there is less comfortable than most brands let on. What breaks a tooth takes it apart properly.

Then watch the stub. Once a stick is down to roughly three inches, small enough to sit whole inside your dog's mouth, the session is over. Trade it for a treat and throw the end out. Stay in the room the whole time: the stub always arrives during the one phone call you had to take.

If your dog has a cracked tooth, a sore mouth, or has just come through a dental cleaning, ask your vet which chews are allowed before any go back in the rotation.

Chews and dental health FAQ

Do bully sticks clean dogs' teeth?

Not the way a toothbrush does. Chewing a dried beef stick is abrasive, and abrasion takes soft material off the tooth faces the stick touches, which is a real mechanical effect. It isn't a cleaning claim, though, because no bully stick has been through the VOHC trials that would let anyone make one. Treat it as time well spent, and keep brushing separate.

Are dental sticks good for dogs?

For one narrow job, yes. A VOHC-accepted chew has cleared two trials against a control group eating dry food and nothing else — never against a toothbrush. Check which claim each one holds, because some are accepted for plaque and tartar and others for tartar alone, and tartar is the visible layer rather than the film that does the damage. They are formulated products, so they carry the additives and the calories a single-ingredient dried chew does not.

If my dog chews every day, do I still need to brush?

Yes. Chewing works on the crown of the tooth, where you can see it, and periodontal disease starts under the gum, where a chew can't go. That's why brushing is the gold standard and everything else is described as helping. If brushing has never been part of your routine, ask your vet to show you the grip at the next visit rather than fighting it alone at home.

A bully stick is a single dried beef muscle that keeps a dog busy for a long stretch. That's the whole claim, and the only one we'll make. Buy it for the chewing, brush for the teeth, pocket the stub.