Our 5 month-old shepherd puppy has taken a liking to pine cones. The ones he likes are the hard ones that haven’t opened yet (we recently cut down a tree here). They are too large to get stuck in his throat.
He has other toys - a rubber Kong, prickly jingle ball, rubber tug toy, and a stuffed Mallard that he has rendered quackless, but seems to prefer the pine cones.
Should we discourage this sort of thing?
capn
Yes, you should discourage him from eating things he finds lying around. Dogs tend not to digest things like pine cones, acorns, mulch, rocks, cat toys, or plastic balls, and these undigested items can cause pyloric or intestinal blockage. Doing surgery to remove these things is horribly expensive, and the animal doesn’t always pull through.
Hmmm… Our dog walker said pine cones were just fine - the dogs know a good thing when they find it - free pine nuts.
But, IIRC, you’re a vet or vet tech, and the blockage risk certainly makes a lot of sense. Is there some age at which it’s OK to let them gnaw one one every so often, or is it an out-and-out bad idea?
Now, if I could just get my dog to stop picking up cigarette butts and bottle caps. And chicken bones. (We live about a block from a Popeyes Chicken and another chicken place right across the street, so the local slobs toss a lot of bones on the street.)
Grew up in the wonderful piney woods of the Sierra Nevadas and our dog never had a problem with pine cones. I say, if it grows on trees and the dog likes it, let him go for it! Probably helps keep his teeth clean.
If it kills him, you can always get another.
Never kiss an animal that can lick its own butt.
I should add, being the OP, that these are big pine cones, not the type he could swallow, and after much chewing and gnashing, he barely makes a dent in them.
I sympathize with gotpasswords, chicken bones are a tough one. I’ve pulled three away from him in one week.
Gatopescado, I don’t think the wife’ll like your logic 
capn
Well, yeah. The problem is that they don’t recognize a bad thing when they find it. As the rest of your post notes.
(Or that they recognize everything as being a good thing …)