Should you care where your dog toys are made? And if you do, what country should you look for them to be made in? Here are a couple of reasons why you should look where your dog's toys come from and what they are made of.
Safety Regulations
Have you bought dog products online? Have you ever looked what regulations dog toys have to meet?
Spoiler alert - NONE. There are no regulations in place for your dog's toys. Unlike human products, there is no organization in charge of maintaining standards that dog toys are held to. That means those dog toys that your furry friend has been chewing on, biting off chunks and even swallowing, may have dangerous chemicals and substances in them.
Heavy Metals and other Toxins
Since there are no regulations, there is a pretty high chance that most of the dog toys you have bought have probably contained heavy metals and other containments, especially if they came from overseas. Look at some of the statistics showing the percentage of dog toys coming from China that contained heavy metals (92%). Or look at the recent reports showing the number of dogs poisoned by dog food made in China.
Not every single toy made in China is dangerous, but the high percentage of dog toys that are dangerous should be concerning to any dog owner.
This is why we only produce our toys using manufacturers right here in the USA.
"Indestructible" Toys
Beware of supposedly "indestructible" toys. If the toy is actually unable to be destroyed, than what gets destroyed with the dog chews on it?
Their teeth.
In addition, some of the indestructible toys that are rubber are made that way through additives that should not be ingested or chewed on - the type of additives that they put in car tires to make them tough. A lot of the ultra tough rubber toys use these additives (carbon black) to increase the toughness - at a cost of increasing the amount of toxic chemicals in your dog's toys.
Product Testing
Because there are no regulations, virtually no testing is ever done on a lot of dog products. When no testing has been done on products, there is no way to know if the products are safe or not, regardless of what the packaging claims. With human products, toys and other items are required by the CPSC to meet standards and test to standards. No such standards exist for dog toys.
Here at Mutty, we manufacture every dog product using materials that are Food Safe, and then test all of our products using 3rd party accredited labs that test our products using the set of standards that baby teethers must meet. Every dog toy we produce meets or exceeds those standards.
Buy USA Made and Verify Testing
To ensure you dog's toys are the safest possible, you should buy made in USA products (both toys and foods) and verify that the companies you buy from complete testing on their toys. Unless a company can provide you test results against some standard (anyone can test, but results are irrelevant unless compared against some standard) then what they claim is irrelevant.