Staying Safe

Petco Dumped Rawhide Five Years Ago. Here's What It Knew.

Rawhide is still on shelves everywhere else, but the risks that made a national pet chain walk away from it haven't gone anywhere: blockages, choking, fractured teeth, chemical processing, and a supply chain nobody can fully trace.

By Dr. Ravi Mehta, Veterinary Nutritionist

April 11, 2026 · 6 min read

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In March 2021, Petco pulled every traditional rawhide product off its shelves. All 32 of them, gone in one sweep. The company’s own customer research found that 71 percent of shoppers had concerns about traditional rawhide, from choking to digestibility to where the stuff actually comes from.

Sit with that for a second. A retailer whose business is selling dog chews decided this particular dog chew wasn’t worth selling. Rawhide didn’t get banned, and it didn’t disappear. You can still buy it at the grocery store, the hardware store, and most other pet shops. But when the industry’s own biggest player walks away from a profitable category, it is worth understanding why. The reasons have been in veterinary case files for decades.

Start with what rawhide actually is

Rawhide is not a meat product. It is a leather-industry byproduct. It begins at a tannery, where a cow’s hide gets split in two. The outer grain is destined for belts and shoes. What’s left underneath, untanned, is what ends up in the chew aisle. That inner split is often purchased from leather tanneries in the “split lime state,” because removing hair from hides typically involves sodium sulfide liming, a genuinely nasty chemical process. Along the way, hides get treated to slow decay, washed in hydrogen peroxide to strip the smell of rot, and sometimes coated with titanium oxide to look whiter. Testing has turned up residues including lead, arsenic, mercury, and formaldehyde in some products.

Because chews made from animal parts count as “food” under FDA rules only in a loose sense, the agency’s own guidance says a maker can sit outside AAFCO’s pet food rules entirely, provided nothing on the package claims the chew is nutritious. There is no marshmallow-cereal-style ingredient panel to squint at, because in many cases there doesn’t have to be.

The seven risks, ranked the way a vet ranks them

1. Intestinal blockage. This is the one that puts dogs on surgery tables. Rawhide is chemically engineered to be tough and durable, which means a dog never really digests it; they just soften it and break off chunks. Those chunks are swallowed whole, don’t break down, and can swell inside the stomach, making them even harder to pass. Best case, a stomach ache. Worst case, a life-threatening obstruction.

“The dangerous moment isn’t the hours of chewing, it’s the last thirty seconds, when the chew finally gets small enough to gulp. That soggy end piece is exactly the size that lodges where it shouldn’t,” says Dr. Mara Chen.

2. Choking. Rawhide consistently ranks among the most common causes of true airway choking in dogs, and the pattern is specific: it is not the careful chewers at risk, it is the gulpers. A dog who wants the treat inside them as fast as possible will attempt a piece too big to swallow, and it can lodge in the esophagus or throat on the way down.

3. Fractured teeth. Chewing on hard objects is the single most common cause of tooth fractures in dogs, a finding that comes out of veterinary dentistry at Cornell. Puppies and gung-ho power chewers are most at risk because they have no inhibition. A slab fracture is painful, expensive, and an open door for infection that can spread beyond the mouth.

4. Processing chemicals. See above: liming, peroxide, whitening agents, and the heavy-metal residues that occasionally ride along. No single chew is likely to poison a dog, but rawhide is a product dogs lick, gnaw, and swallow for hours at a stretch, which is precisely the exposure pattern you don’t want with contaminants.

5. Flavor coatings. The flavored-rawhide boom brought everything from hickory to bubble gum, and the coatings brought their own baggage. The safety data sheet for one bubble-gum flavoring revealed a mix including FD&C Red 40, a suspected carcinogen, alongside preservatives like sodium benzoate. Slow, low-dose exposure is nearly impossible to track, and the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine generally investigates additives only after complaints pile up.

6. Contamination recalls. Rawhide has a recall history of its own. In 2017, United Pet Group voluntarily recalled rawhide chews sold under multiple brand names across the country after a supplier was found using a quaternary ammonium compound, a cleaning chemical not approved for food, in processing. Salmonella contamination is a standing concern with animal-part chews generally, and it threatens the humans handling the chew as much as the dog eating it.

7. A supply chain you can’t see into. Much of the world’s rawhide is produced in Asia with little traceability, and there is no reliable way to know what animal a given chew came from. A Humane Society International investigation of the fur trade documented that skins from dogs slaughtered in Thailand were mixed into rawhide chew production and exported to U.S. stores. That finding is decades old now, but the traceability problem it exposed has never been fixed.

If your dog is a rawhide devotee anyway

Some dogs adore rawhide, and some households will keep buying it. If that’s yours, harm-reduce: supervise every session, take away the softened end piece before it gets gulp-sized, and choose products dried naturally, made in the USA, and free of added flavors and whitening. Skip rawhide entirely for gulpers, for puppies, and for any dog with a history of GI trouble.

What to hand them instead

The chew aisle Petco rebuilt is genuinely better than the one it tore out. Carrots and frozen KONGs stuffed with something lickable satisfy a lot of dogs. Bully sticks and other single-ingredient, free-range chews digest far more completely than hide. Himalayan yak chews suit methodical chewers, and organic raw bones work for some dogs under supervision, though they carry their own tooth-fracture risk. Match the chew to your dog’s style: gulpers get things too big to swallow or things fully edible, and power chewers get durability without rock-hardness.

What’s new since the original warnings

The market has moved fast since Petco’s 2021 exit. Collagen chews, made from the corium layer of hide but processed into a far more digestible product, have become the heir apparent to rawhide, and “rawhide alternative” is now its own shelf category, including easier-to-digest perforated hide products.

The smartest habit to build is checking for the Veterinary Oral Health Council seal when a chew claims dental benefits. VOHC acceptance requires clinical trials showing a product actually reduces plaque or tartar by a meaningful margin, which is a much higher bar than a bag that just says “supports dental health.”