Seeing a dog chewing on a piece of bone is not something really special, even when it seems to get aggressive when disturbed. Dogs love bones. It is a fact. However, not only dogs, but all canines including fox, wolves, jackal, coyotes, dingoes, etc. enjoy chewing on pieces of bone, and they will bury these treasure in the ground to save that piece of delicacy for savoring later. Why do dogs love bones anyway? There are several answers for this question.
Firstly, dogs enjoy chewing on bones because those pieces are sources of nutrition. Dogs know that instinctively. Bone is a perfect food rich in calcium phosphorus and trace minerals. That way, dogs can remove plaque from their body. Besides that, chewing on bones make dogs happy due to the flowing of endorphins. This desire to chew on bones is very strong in dogs and all canines, thus when the natural urge to chew arises, they will start to chew on any hard stuffs they can find including plastic toys, shoes, or even table legs.
Secondly, it has something to do with evolution. Long before dogs are domesticated, their ancestors along with the ancestors of the other modern canines had developed a skull shape with strong jaw muscles and sharp teeth—it was around eight million years ago when open habitats were spreading through Asia, Europe and North America. Since the preys tend to group together so there will be more eyes to watch for a stalking predator, which is to protect themselves, ancient canines would need to hunt together as well so that they will be more likely to succeed in hunting. Hunting in pack was also the only way for smaller predators, including ancient canines, to snatch a very large prey.
Slowly, after a few generations of hunting in pack, their jaws had become more accustomed to biting and holding on their preys. Thus, the modern dogs we see today love to chew—basically, it means biting and holding—on bones because it is simply a leftover evolutionary trait. In other words, predators with larger teeth and stronger jaws were more likely to hunt better, and to survive to pass on their large-toothed, strong-jawed genes to the next generation. It seems that living and hunting in packs coincided with a shift in dogs' diets today.
The resulting evolution of their strong jaws slowly turned the ancestors of our domestic pets into hypercarnivores. Hypercarnivores are animals which have a diet that is more than 70 percent meat, with the balance consisting of non-animal foods such as fungi, plant, etc.. Let us say, they also prey at all stages of life for a variety of organisms. Some of those well-know hypercarnivorous animals are sharks, starfishes, salmons, all sorts of felines (e.g. cats, lions, tigers, etc.) and canines in its natural state.
Dogs love bones. However, are bones really safe for dogs? Is it OK to feed your dogs with raw bones? Is it OK to let your dogs pick any bone from garbage? That is indeed another case and we are discussing about it here.
If a dog's prayers were answered, bones would rain from the sky.
~ Anonymous
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