Dental chews and chew toys provide oral health benefits for dogs but inappropriate choices cause broken teeth, intestinal obstruction, and other welfare harms that owners frequently overlook.
The dental chew market contains products ranging from genuinely beneficial to actively harmful. Hard chews that do not yield when pressed with a thumbnail are too hard and will fracture teeth — a painful, expensive injury requiring extraction under anesthesia. Chews that break into large fragments create intestinal obstruction risk. Yet dental disease in dogs causes chronic pain that dental chews genuinely help prevent. Navigating this landscape requires using VOHC-approved products and avoiding hardness levels that compromise tooth integrity.