Hooves and Marrow Bones: Two Injuries Vets See Constantly

Cow hooves and marrow bones are hard enough to shear the side off a dog's carnassial tooth, and Foodiepaws doesn't sell either one. Both last a long time. That is the whole pitch, and it is also the problem.

The warnings you have already read are interchangeable. Hard is bad, ask your vet, and so on. This page names the two injuries instead — one to a tooth, one to a jaw — and shows you where each was written down.

Why hooves and bones land on the same list

They fail the same test. A chew that is kind to your dog's teeth should dent under your fingernail, and neither of these will. Brian Collins, who heads the Community Service Practice at Cornell's Hospital for Animals, discourages owners from giving bones, antlers or hooves of any kind, or any other hard or abrasive object.

That is the verdict, and the fingernail test has its own page. What a hardness rule can't tell you is what actually breaks when the rule gets ignored. Two things do, over and over. They are not the same injury.

Injury one: the tooth that shears off sideways

The tooth that goes is nearly always the same one. Your dog's carnassials are the upper fourth premolar and the lower first molar — the big shearing pair right at the back. A slab fracture is when the entire outer wall of that upper tooth comes away. Not a chip. The side of the tooth.

The force it takes to break that tooth has been measured. A study loading these teeth to failure put the mean at 1,281 newtons across 24 tests. The line worth reading twice is the authors' own: that sits within the maximum chewing capability of an average dog. Yours included.

So the chew never has to be stronger than your dog. It only has to refuse to give.

A hoof refuses. A femur refuses. Your dog supplies the rest of it, and her tooth is the one that gives.

The break you are not going to notice

Dogs don't reliably yelp and spit it out. They move to the other side and carry on — which is how you can miss this for weeks. Cornell's Riney Canine Health Center says these are very often found by chance, on an oral exam, with no history at all. Watch for pain instead. A fracture that exposes the pulp hurts, and a dog may react to hot and cold, even avoiding fresh, cool water.

The rest of the tells are refusals. A dog who walks away from her chew toys this month, or turns down a treat she has to bite, is telling you about her mouth. Left alone, an exposed pulp can go on to abscess. If any of that is new, book the vet.

Injury two: the ring that locks around a jaw

The second one has a name and a case file. Dottie, a three-year-old Lab and shepherd mix, licked the marrow out of a beef bone and got the empty ring stuck around her lower jaw, locked in behind her canine teeth.

It came off at the ASPCA Animal Hospital in Manhattan, under anesthesia, with Gigli wire — a flexible saw wire, worked back and forth inside the ring until the bone broke in two. The cutting took under a minute. Nothing else about that day did.

The shape is the hazard here, not only the hardness. A marrow bone is a hollow cylinder, and your dog's lower jaw fits through a hollow cylinder. "In general, we think bones should be avoided," is how Camille DeClementi of the ASPCA puts the rule.

What a hoof does that a bone does not

Pick one up and you can feel the difference. A hoof is a shell, not a rod. It is hollow already and curved already, so it doesn't wear down evenly the way a dried muscle chew does. It cracks. Cornell's fractured-tooth page puts hooves next to antlers and bones as objects that may break a tooth, or splinter and cause stomach problems.

A splinter has an edge, and an edge is a different problem from a lump. Not every firm chew fails this way. Dried trachea cracks into rings rather than shards — a separate hazard, worked through in beef gullet and trachea.

Bone is the least digestible thing on the shelf

Say a piece goes down anyway, because sooner or later one does. Bone is the worst case in the numbers.

A 2014 study pushed six treat categories through a simulated dog gut, and bone finished last in both phases by a distance. It dissolved 6.9 to 8.4% in the stomach phase and 10.7 to 27.2% in the intestinal phase. Biscuits ran 93.9 to 98.8% in the same phase.

Which is why bone leads the emergency literature too. Merck's veterinary manual states that bones are the most common foreign body found in the esophagus, and that the usual complication afterwards is a stricture, a narrowing of the tube. The same question in a much smaller object is what the vertebra inside a cow tail is about.

The line we are not going to draw around our own chews

Here is the part a hoof article normally leaves out. John Lewis, a board-certified veterinary dentist, lists the usual causes of a slab fracture as bones, nylon bones, antlers, cow hooves, bully sticks, yak milk treats, rocks and ice cubes. Bully sticks are on it. Ours are bully sticks.

We're not going to argue our way off that list. What we will say is where the difference sits. A bully stick softens as it is worked and a hoof does not, and there is no hollow ring on a pizzle for your dog's jaw to slide into. Every length and thickness we make still arrives with two conditions attached.

Stay in the room. Collins says dogs should be supervised with chews, because it's hard to predict how any individual dog will handle a given object. Sizing up to a jumbo is not a way out of that, and neither is your dog's age.

Then take the stub. Once what's left could go down in one swallow, the session is finished. Trade it for a treat so that handing things over always pays her, and bin the end. A stub is small, and small is the whole risk.

Hooves and marrow bones FAQ

Are marrow bones safe for dogs?

No veterinary source we could find endorses them. The ASPCA's stated position is that bones should be avoided, and its own hospital has cut a marrow ring off a dog's lower jaw under anesthesia. Raw or roasted doesn't change the shape, and the shape is what traps your dog's jaw. Bone also finished last of six treat categories in a lab digestion study, if a piece does get swallowed. We don't sell them.

Can dogs eat cow hooves?

Dogs chew them, and plenty do it without incident, which is why hooves are still sold everywhere. The risk isn't that every hoof breaks a tooth. It's that a hoof can't dent, cracks instead of wearing, and splinters with an edge on it. Cornell names hooves among the objects to avoid for exactly those reasons. If your dog empties a chew in ten minutes, that is the dog being described.

What should I do if my dog breaks a tooth on a chew?

Call your vet, and don't wait for your dog to act hurt. A fracture that opens the pulp is painful whether or not she shows it, and dogs are practiced at hiding it. Take the chew away and keep it, so your vet can see what did the damage. Worth saying on the phone: chewing on one side, flinching at cold water, or refusing a treat she has to bite.

Neither is an evil object. They are the wrong hardness for the dog in front of you — and we would rather say so than stock them. If you want help picking something we do sell, the quiz takes sixty seconds.