Can they eat raw ox tail? We don't really have butchers nearby where we live. Aspen has gotten raw chicken wings and thighs as well as freeze dried duck neck and freeze dried duck head. What else do you feed your dogs?
How hard does your boy chomp down? This will determine if you can give him harder bones - there can be a risk of a cracked molar. Advice is only to give non weight bearing bones, ie NO legs of large animals, so no cow femurs for example. I give my boy venison neck bones mostly. But he’s not a hard chomper and will use his front teeth to scrape a marrow bone clean. If I think he’s chewing too much on the marrow bone (leg bone) - wanting to break it open - I’ll either remove it or smash it open with a hammer; he just wants to get the marrow out, he leaves the bone behind. But he eats up all the venison neck bones. At the moment he’s eating whole rabbit. They’re small animals so I’m happy for him to eat the weight bearing bones, too. If you feed bones, they should have meat on them, too - helps the passage of the bone through the intestine apparently, protects the gut lining. Oh I gave my boy raw ox tail the other day. He loved it! But I think they are high in bone content in relation to the surrounding meat cos his poos were more crumbly than usual. Bones should make up about 10% of the raw diet.
I'm of two minds about oxtail - one of my dogs (Poppy) chews it properly; Merlin is more of a gulper, and doesn't chew the last bit of bone but gulps it down whole. He then has to sick the piece of bone up later... not so good. So for now they are not getting oxtail - although that could just be the size of piece you get at the supermarket. I think if you could get a longer, thinner piece then that would be fine, with more cartilage and less actual bone than the thicker end.
