"Chicken by-product meal consists of the ground, rendered, clean parts of the carcass of slaughtered chicken, such as necks, feet, undeveloped eggs and intestines, exclusive of feathers, except in such amounts as might occur unavoidable in good processing practice."
That stuff sounds gross to us, but, well, lots of animals live primarily on just that sort of thing. When carnivores kill small animals they eat most of it, including those parts. Rendering and the extrusion process used to make dogfood is a whole different topic, but if the problem is with rendering and extruding, that happens whether the parts are "chicken" or "chicken meal" or "chicken by-product meal." For the record, "chicken" itself as defined by AAFCO is not what you think of when you picture chicken. It's "the clean combination of flesh and skin with or without accompanying bone, derived from the parts or whole carcasses of chicken- exclusive of feathers, heads, feet, and entrails."
So one company's chicken might be mostly flesh, another's might be mostly skin and bone. So now we are down to this: how much do you trust the company?
Here's the deal, and I'm old enough to remember the evolution of the definition of "good" dog food:
Originally, many dog foods were mostly cereal. Read the label of something like Kibbles and Bits and you'll see the same thing still. Much of the protein derived from Corn Gluten Meal. Any meat at all was Meat and Bone Meal, or unnamed Meat By Products, and it was far down the list.
Word got around among people who cared that corn gluten meal was an inferior protein source to meat, and that meat and bone meal or meat by-products was bad in that the meat was not named and could come from just about any meat.
So the word became: Find a food with meat or meat meal as the number one ingredient; don't choose a food with corn gluten meal as a significant protein source; don't choose a food with meat and bone meal or mystery meat by-products.
Food companies like Iam's became famous for providing just that. Primary ingredient is meat, grains are used to produce the kibble, by-product is from a named source (chicken) and further down the list, to help balance out proteins and provide micro-nutrients that are abundant in organs and offal and less abundant in meat. And for years that was considered "good" food.
Then up came the internet and "corn gluten is bad protein" has morphed into "Corn causes allergies and is bad." Avoiding mystery "meat by-products" and encouraging the PRIMARY protein source to be meat has morphed into "All by-products are bad." And a handful of very expensive boutique food brands are making a fortune off of this.
I know that's not the popular opinion, but it's what I've seen happen.
The breeder we got our dogs from has had dozens of champions and hundreds of healthy puppies feeding Eukanuba. Eukanuba has both corn and chicken by-product meal.
That's just my two cents. I've looked into it quite a lot and really all I find is the same non-scientific sources repeating the same information so when you go online you just find it repeated over and over. And if something is repeated enough, it becomes "truth" to many people.
