I was wondering if it is okay to give your grey soup bones??

They can damage the teeth. If larger chunks are swallowed, they can cause an obstruction- particularly if they've been cooked.

As a general rule, no weight-bearing bones should be fed, either raw or cooked.

Thank You so much for answering my post it was a lot of help.

ahicks is right.

However, you might also watch how your dog eats. Duncan is the world's slowest, most careful eater. Yesterday it took him 10 minutes to eat a deer trachea. I don't give him weight bearing bones, but they wouldn't be a problem for him since he'd lick at them rather than chomp on them.

If your dog eats like a normal dog, run away from soup bones.

how about a huge the bone that would have been in round steak would that be ok? It has not been cooked

I would stay away from leg bones of cow and deer, as they are very large animals and also ones that are typically not slaughtered young so the bones are even harder. There is a large grey area here also - I consider pork leg bones edible because they carry much less weight than a cow and even my 35 lb dog can eat them. I haven't fed lamb legs but they may fall into this category also. On the flip side, I don't feed most beef bones because I find them quite hard.

I don't consider poultry legs in this category, even though they are technically "weight bearing" because they bear so much less weight than a cow (that would weigh over 1000 lbs). There is also a distinction to be made between meaty bones and meatless ones - and by meaty I mean where there is more meat than bone, not a soup bone with little scraps of tissue stuck to it. Honest-to-goodness meaty bones can be beneficial for tooth cleaning purposes if you take the bone away once the meat is gone. The action of chewing all the meat off provides a good cleaning and dogs are also less likely to crunch on the bone when there is meat to be eaten (depending on the individual dog, of course).


I'm not quite sure how this bone looks, but in general you want to stay away from bones that are too dense and too small. The dense bones can crack teeth, while the small ones can be swallowed whole.