Replies are closed for this discussion.
You want the first 3 ingredients to be actual meat or meat meal preferably. "Chicken" means they're including all the water weight, once this is dried it would be much further down the ingredient list. Chicken by-product is all the nasty bits that are considered unfit for human consumption, beaks, claws, necks, guts, undeveloped eggs, etc. Corn is difficult for dogs to digest and is a very common allergen.
You can use these sites to go through and see all the ingredients in the different foods and what they've been rated:
http://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/
http://www.dogfoodanalysis.com/
If the Eukanuba is hard to find then I would just switch to something else, personally I'm not a big fan of it. I've heard good things about Wellness and Blue Buffalo which I think are moderately priced.
He doesn't need to be on puppy food until he's a year either, many breeders never even use a puppy food at all so you'd be fine to switch him to an adult food now.
It's not actually entirely true about the meat vs the meat meal. It IS true that "chicken" is the wet meat with water weight included, and the "chicken meal" is the dried weight. And it is true that ingredients are listed in weight order.
But if I look at, say, a label for cheese and the first ingredient is milk and then salt and then enzymes, I don't think "Well, milk includes water weight, so the cheese actually has more salt and enzymes (both dry) than milk because of the water weight."
In other words, you need to know more than label order to see what you've got.
For dry food, 100 minus the percent protein minus percent fat minus percent moisture minus percent ash (if listed) = percent of energy from carbs, and THAT is a more important indicator of where meat lies on the ingredient list than if it's listed as meat or meat meal.
Now, sometimes protein comes from vegetable sources, and that is why for instance corn gluten meal (NOT corn meal) is a bad ingredient because it's upping the protein content with vegetable protein instead of meat protein. But in the case of better-quality foods, that's not as big an issue.
So the Eukanuba Dachshund formula is 25% protein, 16% fat, and 10% moisture, which means about 49% carbs.
Blue Buffalo Chicken and Brown Rice is 27% protein, 16% fat, and 10% moisture, and therefore about 47% carbs. A negligible difference, even though the Blue has chicken and chicken meal as its first two ingredients.
As far as by-product-meal being bad, well I would not want it as the first ingredient but remember that most carnivores and omnivores would be eating those carcasses, given half a chance. We see it as yucky simply because our culture dictates it is. Go to England and they make blood pudding (black pudding). Sausage casings are intestines. Scrapple is made of--- well, I won't get into it here. :) But part of the reason we humans frequently need to supplement iron and b-vitamins and the like is because taste dictates we no longer eat those nutrient-rich "scraps" that were once staples; humans did not have the luxury of throwing out such large parts of the animal until very recently.
But cheese isn't being dehydrated...dog food is.
I don't know, after seeing the information on the FDA website, I'd rather see real ingredients listed than by-products. The idea of my dog eating someone's ground up euthanized pet, road kill, or some diseased animal is just not a pleasant one.
Yes, I know kibble is being dehydrated.
Let me put it this way: Say you had a food with two ingredients: chicken and rice. If you started out with a pound of fresh chicken (including water weight) and a tablespoon of rice, the first ingredient would be chicken and the second one rice. After you dehydrate the chicken, guess what? Even if it decreases in weight by 50%, there is STILL more chicken than rice by a wide margin.
You have another food that has chicken meal and rice as the only ingredients. Now, say it has 1.1 oz of chicken meal for every .9 oz of rice. Well, the first ingredient would be chicken meal and the second ingredient rice, but unlike the first food, this food is almost a 50-50 split EVEN THOUGH the second food has chicken meal as the first ingredient, and the first one has chicken in its wet form as the first ingredient.
That's why you need to know more about the ingredients.
Hypothetical Food # 3 might have chicken meal, rice, and oatmeal as the only three ingredients. If for every 1.1 oz of chicken there is .9 oz of rice and .9 oz of oatmeal, then really you have 1.8 oz of grain for every 1.1 oz of chicken, and the food has more grain than chicken. But if for every 1.1 oz of chicken there is .45 oz of rice and .45 oz of oatmeal, then the chicken-to-grain ratio is more or less identical to Food #2, which only had two ingredients.
Like I said, you need to know more which is why the protein/fat/moisture breakdown is important, as well as knowing the source of the protein (i.e., coming from grain vs coming from meat).
Some of the dog food sites have so oversimplified the idea of label reading that they are really not accurate any more. In practice, by the way, most kibbles will have a fair amount of vegetable matter because domestic dogs, on our fairly sedentary schedules, have to watch their intake of protein and fat. Kibbles for working dogs have much more of both. My dogs get about 400 cal a day. A dog running Iditarod needs about 11,000 cal a day. Obviously they can handle a higher percent of their food from fat than mine can.
Finally, a food that contains "chicken by-product meal" is just that. Now, if you know many chickens that are euthanized pets OR roadkill, by all means feel free to pass on that info. There is a difference between chicken-by-product meal and unnamed "meat and bone meal." Chicken has to be just that: chicken. Not many roadkill chickens out there that I am aware of.
Here is the AAFCO definition of chicken by-product meal:
No, I'm not a believer in raw myself.
We feed Iam's lamb and rice, with the occasional scrambled egg, canned salmon or sardines, yogurt, cottage cheese, green beans, pumpkin etc to mix it up.
From what I've read raw chicken will lose about 70-80% of it's weight once it's dehydrated, so the pound/tablespoon analogy seems a little extreme to me. I think it's more like you have a cup of meat and 3/4 cup of by-product, and suddenly that nice hunk of raw meat is reduced to 3 tablespoons instead. That's a significant difference IMO.
I agree there is a difference between chicken by-product and "meat meal", but I would still recommend avoiding either if a person can afford it.Certainly a small amount of scraps is fine for a dog, but I would never want to feed that as their main source of food.
We all have our own views on food. As I said, our breeder feeds Eukanuba and has a long string of champion Corgis going back generations.
Chicken meal and chicken can include skin and bones and there is no way of knowing from manufacturer to manufacturer which "chicken meal" is high-quality and which is not. Moreover, the AAFCO definition is so vague as to what is chicken meal and what is chicken by-product meal that one company might label its meal as the former and another as the latter and they could be very similar (meaning that company x might consider "chicken" to be more meat and include the skin and bones with its "by-products" while company y might have "chicken" that contains a higher percentage of skin and bone and less meat).
I would not want it as the only protein source, but I don't have a problem with by-product meal being on the ingredient list. Certainly the entrails and what have you would be the first thing a feeding pack of scavengers or carnivores would go for, and not the last. I realize you disagree, and I'm fine with that.
© 2024 Created by Sam Tsang.
Powered by
