Benebone Wishbone Review: Months of Chewing by a Beagle Mix

Murphy is a six-year-old beagle mix, about 28 pounds, tan and white with a black saddle. He came home from the shelter four years ago and he has run this house ever since. He is a chewer, and not in the cute way. In his first month here he worked the corner of my kitchen table into a splintered mess, took the finish off one dining chair leg, and killed a plush duck faster than I could get the tags off it. His nose runs his whole day, and his mouth has to be busy while the rest of him settles down.

I bought a lot of bad toys before I got this part right. Then in May I ordered the Benebone Wishbone, size Medium, chicken flavor, mostly because a neighbor with a big Lab told me hers had lasted a year. That was six months ago. I want to tell you what those six months actually looked like, because I wasted a fair amount of money on things that were gone in an afternoon, and I would like to save you the same trouble.

How I've Used It

The Wishbone lives in a wicker basket beside the couch, next to the remote and Frank's reading glasses. Murphy gets it out most evenings after dinner, somewhere around seven, while we are watching television. He carries it to the middle of the rug, pins it down with both front paws, and works at one end for twenty minutes or so. Then he drops it, circles twice, and goes to sleep with his chin on the couch cushion. Some nights he never touches it. Some nights he goes back to it three times.

I handed it to him on a Tuesday evening in May, right there on the living room rug, and he sniffed it for a good ten seconds before he picked it up and carried it off to his corner. Then he ignored it for four days. I figured I had wasted my money again and I dropped it in the basket with the rest of the graveyard. The following week he started pulling it out on his own, and by the end of May it was the only thing in that basket he touched. That is the pattern with him. He does not take to anything on the first day, and I have finally stopped expecting him to.

I have not trained him to use it and I have not had to coax him. It is the only toy in that basket he still chooses. The rope is somewhere under the couch and the rubber thing went in the closet back in July. He picks the Wishbone out of the pile himself, which for a beagle is about as strong an endorsement as you are going to get from one.

The one rule in this house is that chewing happens where I can see it. I sit in the same room. When he is done, the Wishbone goes back in the basket and I look at it once a week under the kitchen light, turning both ends over in my hands. That habit started after a rubber toy came apart on him two winters ago and I found a piece of it on the rug. I am not going through that again, not for any toy.

What Six Months of Chewing Has Actually Done to It

Both ends are roughed up now. The surface has gone from smooth to something closer to a worn-down pencil eraser, and the tips are a little flattened where his back teeth work. What I have not found is a chunk missing, a crack, or a splinter. I check for all three every week. So far the surface has worn down slowly and evenly instead of breaking off in pieces, and that is the whole reason I keep putting it back in the basket.

My inspection is Sunday morning, coffee in one hand and the toy in the other. I run my thumb over both tips, press on the curve, and hold it up to the window to look for a line I might have missed. The first real wear showed up in July, a rough patch about the size of a dime on the end he favors. It has not grown much since, which surprised me more than anything else in this whole experiment. The plush duck he killed in his first year was in three pieces by dark, and the distance between those two outcomes is the entire reason I keep buying this one.

For comparison, we went through four plush toys in his first year and two of those lasted less than a day. A rope toy he liked made it about three weeks before it was a frayed knot. I am not going to pretend the Benebone is untouched. It has six months of a 28 pound dog's back teeth on it and it looks it. But it is whole, and that is more than I can say for anything else in that pile.

I know it will not last forever. The label says to replace it when it gets small or shows signs of breaking, and I believe that. When one end wears down to a nub I will order another one. Six months of near-daily chewing is a fair run in this house, and I would rather buy the same thing again than keep guessing at new ones the way I did for the first two years.

Does It Actually Keep Him Busy?

Here is the honest answer. It keeps him busy for about twenty minutes, three or four nights a week, and a big night is forty minutes. That is not the two hours of quiet some people picture when they buy a chew toy. What it does do is give him something to work on at the hour when he used to get into trouble, which in this house is the hour after dinner when Frank and I are too tired to be entertaining.

One night in August we had company, four people around the dining table and a lot of noise, and Murphy worked that Wishbone under my chair for a solid half hour without anybody stepping on him or shooing him out of the room. That is the sort of evening where it earns its keep. The other side of it: the Sunday we skipped the county park because of rain, he chewed for five minutes, dropped it, and spent the rest of the afternoon barking at the mail slot. A tired dog leaves the toy alone, and a bored dog does not.

The mental part of it is real enough. He works one end, switches to the other, picks it up and carries it to a different spot, then starts over. It is work for him, not a race. On the nights he ignores it, he is usually tired from a longer walk, so I have stopped reading too much into the quiet nights.

What it has not done is replace anything. He still needs his two walks. He still needs the slow feeder at dinner or he inhales his kibble and burps for ten minutes afterward. The chew toy is one piece of a routine that keeps a beagle mix out of trouble, and I would be lying if I told you it did the job on its own.

The Grip and the Size Question

The thing that makes this work for Murphy is the shape. It is curved, so he can get a paw on one arm and hold it steady while his back teeth do the work. Before this, I bought him a straight chew bone out of a bin at the pet store. It rolled off the rug onto the hardwood every time he set it down, he chased it under the couch, and after the third time in one evening I put it in the donate bag. The curve on this one means it stays where he puts it.

It also means he can grab it in the middle and carry it across the room, which he does, usually right into the walkway where I am carrying laundry. The Medium measures 6.69 by 4.72 by 1.18 inches and weighed 6 ounces on our kitchen scale. Murphy is 28 pounds, so Medium was the obvious pick and it has been right for him. He gets his whole mouth around the ends without having to strain.

The listing calls it a medium size and also says all breed sizes, which is a little contradictory, so I would go by your own dog rather than the bag. If you have a hard chewer much bigger than Murphy, I would look at the larger sizes before this one. If you have a small dog, this is likely more chew than they need and more than they want to carry around. That is not a knock on the toy. It is sizing, and sizing is the one thing you cannot fix after the box arrives.

What the Label Says, and What I Do Anyway

One detail on the listing matters more than anything else for us. It is not water resistant, so it stays in the house. It does not go out to the back yard, it does not come on the weekend walk, and it does not go anywhere near the water bowl. Murphy dropped it in his bowl once in June, and I fished it out and let it sit on the counter for two days before he got it back.

The other is supervision. Everything I have read, and everything our vet has said about chews in general, comes down to the same thing. You watch the dog, you take the toy away when it gets small, and you throw it out when it starts to break. That is not a knock on Benebone. It is how chew toys work. A dog can swallow something he should not, and I would rather sit through twenty minutes of television with one eye on him than spend an evening at the emergency clinic.

I wipe it down with a damp cloth about once a week and let it air dry on the counter. That is the whole maintenance routine. Nothing soaks, nothing goes near the dishwasher, and it has not picked up a smell that bothers anybody in this house.

Where It Falls Short

It is not a cure for a busy mouth. Murphy chews it, he settles, and then when he is bored of it he is back at the table leg. What has actually helped with the table leg is giving him something to do before he gets wound up, which for us is a walk and then the slow feeder at dinner. The chew toy is part of the routine, not a solution to it.

It is also not a fetch toy or a tug toy. It is heavy enough that when he drops it on the hardwood at nine at night the whole house hears it, and Frank has said something about that more than once. Rugs help. Nothing else does.

And I will say the obvious thing. If your dog is a serious power chewer, this is a toy you will replace eventually, not a toy you hand down to the next dog. Six months is a good run and I am pleased with it. But it is a consumable, same as the last one. That is not a knock on Benebone either. It is just what a chew toy is.

Six months, one Wishbone, both ends roughed up, no chunks missing, and it is still the first thing he picks out of the basket after dinner.

Who This Is For

This suits a medium dog, somewhere in that 20 to 40 pound range, who chews hard and needs something to settle him in the evening. It suits a household where somebody is home and sitting in the same room while the dog works on it, because that is how it should be used. It suits people like me, who are tired of buying a toy on Saturday and throwing it out on Tuesday. If your dog takes to it the way Murphy did, you will get months out of one toy, and you will stop thinking about chew toys for a while. That is worth something.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if your dog is a hard chewer well over 50 pounds, because you want a bigger size than Medium and possibly a different product entirely. Skip it if the dog will be alone with it, since no chew should be left with a dog nobody is watching. Skip it if you want a toy for the yard, the park, or the water, because this one is not built for any of that. And skip it if you are after something that cleans teeth. That is not what this is, and I would not pretend otherwise.