Bulldog Crack: Rawhides and Booda Velvet Bimples

So we finally took the plunge and introduced Ruki to rawhide chews. I had heard so many cautionary tales about rawhides and bullies: you have to constantly watch your bulldog so that she doesn't tear off a bit and choke on it.

But she was getting too quickly bored with her other toys: the stuffed ones with squeakers, the knotted rope pull toy, the rubber bone, etc.

We started with a pressed rawhide from the breeder. She didn't mind it, but then I watched to see what kind of things she chewed on. Ruki loves sawed off stumps of shrubbery, and I realized she wanted something softer than pressed rawhide. I tried other Nylabones, and finally she found her favorite in a flexible, soft, rubbery chicken-flavored Nylabone.

That was a few weeks ago. Most recently, she's been chewing on the soft plastic corners of her crate. (Also, we just moved her from the small, puppy/cat crate to a larger, medium-sized breed crate. She took to it in a few minutes--no adjustment period needed here!) So I realized she needs something new.

The rawhide? It's like crack. She loves them. She even sometimes cries when I take them away from her--which I try to do so she knows that *I* commence playing and chew-fun, not her. I try to keep her chewing on them in one or two places--I don't want her chewing on the rug so it doesn't assume the smell and taste of the rawhide.

Recently, I picked up a Booda Velvet Bimple bone. It looked soft enough for her puppy teeth and jaws. Wow. She loves that one, too. But I really have to watch her with this. In about an hour, she stripped all the bumpies off the Booda--leaving little plasticy bits all over. I vacuumed those up. Then she really went to town. The Boodas are made of corn starch, so it starts getting white and foamy after a while. I heard in a discussion forum of a bulldog that chewed one of those down and then started puking up white stuff--the Booda corn starch.

Which, on a side note, is weird to put in a digestible bone because corn products, I thought, *weren't* digestible by dogs. Oh well. Right now, she has neither rawhide nor Booda in her mouth, and now she's just exploring...