The Bark decided to do some digging into the ubiquitous rawhide product our dogs all know and love and found some unnerving realities about the processes/effects of production/consumption. The following a handy bulletpointed distillation of the article

- “If rawhide manufacturers were held to the same standards as drug makers, they’d be forced to add an equally long list of warnings to their labels: May cause stomach torsion, choking, vomiting, diarrhea, salmonella poisoning and exposure to various chemical residues.”

- “Producing rawhide begins with the splitting of an animal hide, usually from cattle. The top grain is generally tanned and made into leather products, while the inner portion, in its “raw” state, goes to the dogs. Removing the hair from hides often involves a highly toxic recipe: sodium sulphide liming. A standard practice is to procure rawhide in the “split lime state” as by-products from tanneries. In the post-tannery stage, hides are washed and whitened using a solution of hydrogen peroxide. And that’s just one step…Other poisonous residues that may show up in rawhide include arsenic and formaldehyde”

- “Even dog skin is a possibility. An ongoing investigation of the fur trade by Humane Society International, an arm of the HSUS, resulted in this information, as listed on their website: “In a particularly grisly twist, the skins of brutally slaughtered dogs in Thailand are mixed with other bits of skin to produce rawhide chew toys for pet dogs.”

- “Rawhide is a by-product of the CAFO—or concentrated animal feeding operation, the bucolic term for today’s industrial farm.” There is a “major problem with various drugs… antibiotics, arsenicals and hormones [which are] used to boost production” in hogs/beef in that their residue inevitably end up in domesticated dogs.

- don’t buy “rawhide. Instead, [buy] free-range chews, bully sticks, and organic raw bones”