Bad teeth due to swallowing food whole

Hiya

Is there a dry, complete food that comes in rather large pieces so that the dog has to chew it, rather than swallowing it whole please, does anyone know?

One of my Westies had lion jaw as a puppy and so seems to have developed the habit of swallowing food whole rather than chewing it, and her teeth are much worse than the others despite my attempts at brushing.

Hills t/d seems to be quite good as it's in large pieces so I've been giving her a couple of pieces of this with each meal which she crunches, but I can't afford to feed her on this full time as it's so expensive. She swallows Burns and Autarky whole so I wondered if there was another mainstream food anyone may have come across that has larger pieces that have to be crunched rather than swallowed whole?

arden grange do a large kibble and the pieces are pretty big

Raw bones? Rawhide chews?

I too would suggest raw bones/ raw chicken wings - always good for a good crunch - tasty and very good for cleaning teeth - perhaps you could look at cleaning teeth as well.

There are plenty of large reasonably priced food about - not a fan of Hills anyway so shop around and see what you can find.

Apparently it's quite natural for a dog to do this as it's what wolves would do - wolf (excuse the pun!) down large pieces of meat and let their stomach do the digesting - carnivorous teeth are designed for tearing meat, no blunt molars to chew to food, and the stomach is quite acidic to digest the food whole.
You can buy bowls for dogs that eat too quickly, but a cheap fix to try is to put a tennis ball into the food bowl - so they have to pick up smaller mouthfuls.

Otherwise I'd ditto raw - Casper had horrible plaque/tartar when I got him, the vet thought he'd been fed on cheap wet food, and now he's on raw his teeth are gleaming. If you're worried he'll swallow large bits of bone, buy chicken legs/wings and hold one end as he chews to prevent him swallowing it.

Just to echo the raw advice. Rib bones are also great as the dog will pull the meat off having the effect of "flossing" as well as cleaning from the bone..

... we always supervise, just in case but have no problems so far. Most of the dogs are quite big but we do have a toy poodle who loves his raw... turkey necks his favourite

I would also suggest some raw. My old dog had quite a bit of plaque on his teeth when I started giving him raw - either chicken legs or stuff like raw fish, chicken breasts etc, and it really did clean his teeth perfectly.