Is Your Dog a Sensible Eater? And all you need to know about lamb necks…

We all know those dogs that ARE sensible and those that ARE NOT…

I once heard a story about a Staffie called Tex who discovered the stash of chicken carcasses his owner had put aside for him. The idea being to give him one each weekend. Well, Tex discovered the sack before the owner had a chance to put them away and proceeded to inhaled 8 of them in a row! Tex (who did live for another 9 years FYI) definitely wasn’t a sensible eater…

Today I want to talk about Lamb Necks, which have had a special place in dog treat lore for decades.

Lamb Necks are ideal for those dogs that can eat food and bones ‘sensibly’… They provide a good balance between providing meat and bone into a dog’s nutrition and have arguably one of the best teeth cleaning abilities in the treat world.

 LAMB NECKS DOG TREATS – MAIN BENEFITS 

Fitting neatly into the dog bone dog treat category, many people surprisingly don’t try Lamb Necks (or other bone treats) based on myths put out there in cyber-land by large dog food companies who want you to buy their cheap vegetable based dog food and their treats ONLY. Anything but genuinely natural dog food! But these are a sample of the many benefits of real animal based treats:

• DOG Occupation
  The main reason many people give their dogs treats in the first place. That is, bones in general occupy dogs for LONGER than other treats, because they are not as easy to consume quickly. They also engage the dogs brain in how it removes the meat around the bone, rather than just inhaling small kibble pieces.
• Nutrition
  As you may have realised, being a natural and healthy dog treats company, we are PRO bones – for those dogs who chew carefully. Lamb necks in particular provide a lot of nutritious lamb meat.  For medium sized dogs who chew carefully, if they can break the bone pieces off, the bones provide a good source of natural calcium and phosphorous, without the higher bone breaking forces required to break open many of the leg bone dog treats. There is also the benefit that the marrow contains saturated animal fats.
• Teeth Cleaning Function
  Lamb Necks dog treats provide a third benefit to many dogs, as besides providing ample meat (that most leg bones don’t), they also provide one of the BEST DOG TEETH CLEANING options around.

Their honeycomb bone structure means that almost ANY dog eating these bones can get plaque and other food bits scraped off their teeth, naturally, without having to buy highly processed incredibly unnatural green compressed vegetable matter from the large factories. Another comparable option would be

• Kangaroo tail pieces (because of their low fat, organic meat option).
• Kangaroo tail tips, or
• Roo lumbar bones

• SAFETY

This might seem like a strange benefit, considering that some experts want you to believe that bones are all bad, but THIS is a big hidden reason for feeding dogs COOKED bones.  For the same reason that humans cook meat, cooked bones mean that all of the bacteria in the bone are killed.

The nutrition in the meat survives, but pathogens are removed. For people who prefer raw bones from butchers, that might be ideal if a dog is powerful enough to splinter a big bone, but for the majority of dogs that are a little more careful with how they eat, killing the bacteria on the meat is a massive plus !

WHICH DOG TYPES ARE BEST SUITED TO LAMB NECKS?

Dog Treat Bones typically fit into the BIG dog treat category, because most people want their dogs getting ‘full value’ for the treat they buy, and this expectation is often that the dog consumes the whole bone.  The issue with this is whether your dog’s breed, age and specific eating style has it be careful enough with how it crunches down on a bone before eating it.

The aim of dried big bones that we sell are that they are dried enough to not rot, but not dried enough to be incredibly fragile and sharp when broken. But that said, almost any bone when broken tends to have sharp pieces. The main risk to any dog is in the swallowing process, as a dog’s stomach acid level is extremely high so they can fully digesting bone material.

At Healthy Dog Treats we appreciate that some owners need larger bones or bones that break off safely into segments like lamb neck bones.

There are some Rottweilers and Staffies (similar to Tex mentioned above) that give very little thought to their own safety when eating bones, they are ravenous and just try to crunch as fast and swallow even faster to get to the nutritious marrow. But these are exactly the dogs that should be supervised with all bone treats, including lamb necks.

If your big breed dog chews thoughtfully and carefully breaks bones into small pieces before swallowing, then these kinds of bones are really useful for them.

That said, owners of small and medium dogs who can do little besides chew some of the end of regular leg bone dog treats find the teeth cleaning value and meat nutrition of lamb necks makes them a preferred treat for their dog. Again, we always recommend supervision with dogs eating treats, especially bone type treats.

CONCLUSION

If your dog is a sensible eater of treats (doesn’t to rush and chews them down before trying to swallow) lamb necks can provide a great option for them. Its teeth will get plenty of great cleaning and the dog will get plenty of nutritious Australian lamb meat.  The process of eating around the bone (which some smaller or medium dogs might do) will still give them a fairly long occupation period.

Note, like most of the bones in our range, these are individually wrapped in plastic. This is to keep the moisture level constant and keep the bone meat integrity (rather than falling off in transport).

As with all our bones, if in doubt, we recommend getting your vets advice about the value to your specific dog.