Dasuquin Review: A Season of Soft Chews for a 78-Pound Lab

The first thing I noticed was not the stairs. It was the pause before the stairs. Biscuit would stand at the top of the four brick steps off our back porch, look down into the yard, and take a beat before he committed to going down. He was nine when our vet found mild arthritis in both hips at his September 2025 checkup. He is ten now, a seventy-eight pound yellow Lab who used to take those steps at a trot. By the time we landed on Nutramax Laboratories Dasuquin MSM soft chews for large dogs, we had already been through a budget chew I bought myself and a tablet our vet recommended at the December recheck. I am not a vet. I am a high school soccer coach in Marietta, Georgia, with a dog who still wanted to come camping. This is what a season of soft chews actually looked like, and what it did not fix.

Here is the honest version up front. Dasuquin did not turn Biscuit back into a two-year-old, and nothing was going to. What changed was smaller and more useful than that. He stopped hesitating at the top of the steps. He got up from his afternoon nap on the laminate without that little gathering of himself first. He was back to forty-minute walks by late spring. And he thinks the chew is dessert, which matters more than you would guess when you are trying to get a large dog to take something every single day without a fight.

How I've Used It

We started in March 2026 on our vet's suggestion, stepping up from the Cosequin DS tablets Biscuit had been on since December. Her reasoning was plain: the added MSM and the ASU were worth trying for a dog his size with two bad hips. I ordered the 84-count tub of the large-dog soft chews from Nutramax Laboratories. For what it is worth, the tub measures 10 by 3 by 7.25 inches and weighs a little over a pound, so it sits on the shelf above the kibble bin without taking the shelf over. I wrote March 14 on the lid with a marker that first afternoon, and that turned out to be the most useful thing I did all spring, because by the time I wanted to judge the thing I could not have told you within a month when we started.

The routine is simple. The label amount for his weight, which our vet checked, set on top of his evening kibble rather than handed to him. He inhales kibble, so putting it in the bowl makes him slow down and actually chew the thing instead of swallowing it whole. He now plants himself by the bowl around six o'clock and stares at the cabinet where the tub lives. The beef flavor is doing a lot of work in this arrangement. For the first couple of weeks I stood in the kitchen and watched him clean the bowl, which is not necessary and probably says more about me than about him. Now I set it down, he finishes, and he walks off to the rug by the back door.

One caution from my own mistake. Keep the tub closed and up high. The first week I left it on the kitchen counter and came back to a Lab with his nose in it and a guilty look. That is not a Dasuquin problem. That is a Lab problem, and I knew better.

What Is Actually In It, And Why Our Vet Moved Us Up

The label lists glucosamine hydrochloride at 900 mg and MSM at 800 mg per soft chew, plus sodium chondroitin. What separates this from the plain glucosamine chews we started with is ASU, avocado and soybean unsaponifiables, and that is the ingredient our vet pointed to when she suggested the switch. Nutramax Laboratories has been in pet health for over twenty-five years, and the brand is recommended by more veterinarians than any other. That is not the same as proof it will work on your dog. It is a fair reason to start here rather than with a tub of unknown powder from a name you have never heard of. I read the label in the truck in the parking lot before I ordered, then called our vet's office to confirm that the amount printed on it was the amount she wanted for a dog his size. It was. The call took four minutes and I would recommend it to anybody.

The other label detail I noticed and appreciated is that it is crab free. If your dog has any kind of shellfish sensitivity, that is the sort of thing you want to know before you buy anything in this category, and most listings bury it.

A soft chew is not a tablet, and I did not think that difference mattered much until July. Biscuit had always eaten the Cosequin tablets whole, like a treat. A dog with a sore mouth, or a dog who chews around pills and spits the pieces onto the floor, will have an easier time with something that feels like food. Hold that thought.

The Four Brick Steps

The steps are the test I trust most, because they are the same four steps every day and I do not have to think about them or remember to look. In early March, Biscuit took them one at a time with a stop at the top. By mid April he was taking them in a normal rhythm, front feet down, back feet following, no pause. That is a small thing to write down on a notepad. It was not small to watch from the porch with a cup of coffee. The morning I actually wrote it down was a Saturday in the middle of April, cool and clear. He came out the back door, went down all four without stopping, walked the fence line the way he used to, and came back up. I stood there feeling ridiculous about how good that was.

The walks moved the same way. Through the winter we were doing twenty minutes, flat, on the sidewalk in front of the house. By late May he was doing forty minutes on the greenway with two gentle rises in it, and he was still pulling toward the truck when we turned around. Our vet's instructions have been consistent the whole time: keep him lean, walk him steady and short, and give a joint supplement. He dropped from 84 pounds to about 78 over the past year on smaller portions and fewer scraps from my plate, and I think that did as much for him as anything in the tub.

The truck was the last thing to come back. He had been hesitating before jumping into the back seat of the cab since the fall, standing there with his front paws on the sill and thinking it over. Around late May he started doing it again, with a short pause first and then up. I will take that.

By mid April he was taking the four brick steps in a normal rhythm, front feet down, back feet following, no pause at the top.

The Seven Weeks He Was Off It

In July 2026 Biscuit had a tooth extracted. Soft food only for a while, a sore mouth, and nothing hard or chewy. The extraction was a Wednesday. I dropped him off at seven in the morning with no breakfast, which he took as a personal betrayal, and picked him up that afternoon with a shaved foreleg, a bottle of pain medicine, and instructions to keep him quiet for a few days. Our vet okayed swapping the soft chew for a liquid glucosamine with collagen stirred into his food for that stretch, and it got us through about seven weeks. He never turned the liquid down, which was a relief, because a dog on soft food who refuses his food is a bad week for everybody.

Here is the part that told me something. Somewhere around week four of that pause, the hesitation at the top of the steps came back. Not as bad as March had been. But it was there, and I had stopped expecting it. He was also stiffer getting up off the laminate after his afternoon nap, which is the other thing I watch. When we went back to the soft chews in late August, that eased off again over the following few weeks.

I am not going to pretend that is a controlled study. He was recovering from surgery, he was eating soft food, he was not walking as far. Too many things changed at once to hand all the credit to one product. But it was the closest thing to a before and after test I am ever going to get with one dog, and it lined up with what I saw in the spring. The rest of that liquid bottle is still in the pantry. He is back on the chew.

What It Does Not Do

It does not fix arthritis. Biscuit is ten, and his hips are his hips. On a cold, wet morning in February he is slower getting off his bed, and no chew is going to change that. If you are reading this hoping to skip the vet appointment, please do not. The diagnosis has to come from someone with an x-ray machine and a license, because there are other things that look like a stiff hip and some of them are not a supplement problem at all.

It also costs more than a plain glucosamine chew, and I would not tell you otherwise. What you are paying for is the combination, the ASU and the MSM alongside the glucosamine and chondroitin, plus a manufacturer that has been at this a long time. If the budget is tight right now, a simpler glucosamine chew and a leaner dog is a reasonable place to start. That is exactly what we did for the first three months.

And it takes weeks. If you are expecting a difference by Friday you will be disappointed, and you will probably quit before it has a chance. Week five was the first point where I could point at something specific and say that is different than it was.

The Fish Oil Runs Alongside It

Since January 2026, Biscuit has also had a liquid omega-3 fish oil on his morning kibble at the label amount for his weight, kept in the refrigerator door once it is opened. Our vet suggested that too. It is not a glucosamine product, so it does not compete with the chew, and both of them sit in the same routine now: fish oil in the morning, the soft chew after dinner.

I mention it because it is the other half of the plan, and I would rather you see the whole picture than believe one chew did everything by itself. If you decide to try more than one thing, stagger the start dates and write them down. When something changes in six weeks you will want to know what started when.

Who This Is For

This is for the owner of a large dog, seven and up, who has a diagnosis or at least a vet's suspicion of hip or joint trouble and wants a daily chew with more in it than plain glucosamine. It suits a dog who takes food easily, because the whole plan falls apart if your dog spits it out and walks away. And it suits someone willing to give it five or six weeks before deciding, with a note on the calendar about what the dog looked like on day one.

It also suits a household that already has the other pieces in place. A lean weight and a steady, short walking routine did a lot for Biscuit, and I would not want to separate those from the chew and pretend the tub did it alone. If you are not willing to do the boring parts, the boring parts are most of the result.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if your dog has not been seen by a vet about the stiffness. You could be looking at something a joint supplement will not touch, and you would spend six weeks finding that out while the real problem waits. Get the diagnosis first, then pick a product.

Skip it if your dog is a counter surfer and you cannot keep the tub out of reach, unless you enjoy cleaning up after a very pleased Labrador. Skip it if you need a result this week. And skip it if a plain glucosamine chew is what your budget genuinely allows right now. That is not a failure. That is where we started, and it was not wasted time.