I almost had an emergency room situation with Jaspar and a chicken wing -- vomited up 12 hours later in two undigested pieces, two very sharp ends of bone sticking out. :yikes While I've fed necks and wings carefully supervised before and since, and do know that if crunched down they do *generally* get digested, it is totally untrue that raw bones are 'soft' and pose no possible problems once they go down the hatch. This made me understand exactly how dogs get perforations and die from the odd raw bone that doesn't get crunched and I decided I hadn;t seen enough benefit from raw bones to outweigh the potential risk of feeding them daily and waiting for the one that goes in the wrong way. I would not risk Jaspar's life simply to have cleaner teeth!
However I like knuckle bones and occasional necks. I also would quite happily feed premade raw, as there are many that sound like they'd be great alternatives, but we cannot get it in Ireland. Making homemade raw was too messy and I really couldn't ask the woman who minds my dogs when I am gone to handle raw food either, so those all influenced me not feeding raw any longer. I've seen no difference in benefit; the dogs do well on either diet.
Like Alison I make fresh homemade as the main meals, usually stews but often just lightly browned meat, and lots of fresh fruit and veg etc, supplemented now and then by a good quality dry. I think supermarket raw meat is exposed to too many possible toxins in the abbatoir process.
Which still doesn;t answer your question! But having had personal experience of seeing a totally undigested, lethal looking wing reappear 12 hours after it was eaten -- and after it was causing serious distress to my dog at 3 am before it was vomited up, just as I was preparing to go to the emergency clinic -- I can provide actual evidence that feeding raw meaty bones isn't the totally safe experience many would argue. It was a pivotal moment for me regarding RMBs -- it seemed silly to be worrying about the possible long term effects of vaccinating too frequently, for example, yet be giving the dog raw bones that nearly lost me the dog. :yikes
I am not against BARF at all, especially not the raw meat mixes in which bones are ground in. But I am not convinced of raw's safety any longer, having read the existing double-blind scientific work that has been done, all of which shows potentially risky microorganisms on the food and excreted later from the dog back into the environment -- the latter I think has to be a responsibility issue too. If a dog sheds salmonella, even if it doesn't affect the dog, unless we scrub and sterilise the ground after it defecates each time, we are leaving salmonella in the environment where it can affect children or the elderly in particular. I think people need to consider the risk v. benefit Big Picture and how all these issues are managed, and decide what is comfortable to and works for them.