Dear plutarch: My father, what's in a name, was an avid hunter. We always had hunting dogs. Both setters and retrievers. One of my very early memories is of a Chesapeake Bay Retriever who would not let me get more than knee deep at the beach before he grabbed me by seat of bathing trunks, and dragged me way out of the water. We had Labs and Goldens. Tireless Frisby artists. I never tested their preferences between bones and sticks. But my impression was that when chewing on a stick, it was a substitute for a bone.