The Most Expensive Cow Hoof

I picked Harley up from the vet’s office after work today. I dropped him off earlier this morning to have two teeth extracted, and asked them to go ahead and clean the rest while he was under. Everything went smoothly, which is always good. He got a clean bill of health from the dental vet. So, now at 6 years of age, he is already down 4 teeth. That just seems like too many to me, especially since his teeth are normally pretty clean (thanks to the raw bones) and his mouth healthy.

For those of you who like to give your dogs cow hooves to chew on, and think they make an economical substitute for real bones, I am here to say it could be the most expensive chew you ever buy your dog.

I don’t normally allow the dogs to chew hooves. Besides the fact that they stink horribly, they are a common cause of slab fractures in dog’s teeth. I had always heard of the danger, but never really paid attention to it. After all, I had given hooves to my old Dobe-mix all the time with out any problems. I stopped buying them because they were messy and smelly, and stepping on one in the middle of the night can rip a hole in your foot, not because I was worried about cracked teeth. Then one night, about two years ago, Harley sequestered one of the forbidden chews from a visiting dog’s crate. I didn’t even know the hoof had been in there. I was on the computer, so I wasn’t paying too much attention to what he was chewing, just noticed he was happily occupied. The next thing I know I hear this huge CRACK! That was the sound of the cow hoof splitting in two. Unfortunately, it was also the sound of his upper 4th premolar cracking in two.

The tooth was repaired. I had opted to do a root canal instead of an extraction. The 4th premolars are those huge molars on the side of the dog’s mouth that look like two teeth fused together. They are the most important teeth a dog has. They do the bulk of the slicing, grinding and chewing when a dog eats. If there was a way to preserve what he had left, I wanted to keep the tooth. After the root canal, he still had a tooth there, but it looked strange. The vet removed the slab part that fractured off. It was pretty painful for a long time, even for my normally stoic Harley.

All though the tooth was repaired, it would never be as strong as a normal, intact tooth. There is always a danger of it cracking again. That is exactly what happened one morning last year while Harley was eating his breakfast of neck bones. This time the tooth split completely in two, and I knew it would have to be extracted. Cost? Just slightly less than the root canal I had already paid for.

Dogs tend to chew on one side of the mouth more than the other, just like people. The side Harley always chewed on? You guessed it, the side with the fractured, and now removed, tooth. Once that important molar had been damaged, he wasn’t able to chew as well on that side, and switched to chewing almost exclusively on the other side. As a result, the back molars behind the big premolar were staying dirty and gunky. They did not get the benefit of hard chewing to keep them clean. While the rest of his teeth were sparkly, two of his back molars were starting to look really bad. Harley developed a nasty funk to his breath that just wouldn’t go away. Then, last week as I was cleaning his teeth, I noticed one of them was loose. It was back to the dental vet, and he confirmed what I suspected. Both teeth would need to be removed. And another big vet bill.

So, I can honestly say that was the most expensive cow hoof any of my dogs have ever had. Needless to say, they are expressly forbidden around here now!

Oh, and for those of you who were counting. Harley also had a lower incisor knocked out by a hard bumper one day in training. He likes to make a game of trying to catch the bumpers, and this one caught him instead.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Harley. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.