Dog Food Ratings - They Dont Tell The Whole Story

There are all sorts of dog food ratings and comparison charts and reviews you can get comparing one commercial brand to another, analyzing crude protein content, calorie values, ingredient sources, and so on. There are two things that are never mentioned, however: ingredient definitions and comparisons to home made dog foods. Why not?

One obvious answer is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to compare a commercial brand to "home made" because of the broad range of possibilities for home made dog foods; there is no one standard home made dog food recipe. And there is some truth in this. Another not so obvious answer is that a lot of these reviews are commissioned by the manufacturers themselves and they aren't going to put something in a review or comparison that makes them look bad.

If you read the ingredients lists on cans of pet foods, one ingredient that you will see time after time is "meat by-products". Do you know what that is? It's the non-rendered, clean parts, other than meat, derived from slaughtered mammals. It includes, but is not limited to, lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, partially defatted low temperature fatty tissue, and stomachs and intestines freed of their contents. It does not include hair, horns, teeth and hoofs. Sounds appetizing, doesn't it?

If you are buying a can of "Beef Delight" for your Fido and it contains meat by-products, you would expect those by-products to be beef, but you could easily be wrong. The definition says derived from mammals, which means they could be pigs, goats, any mammal, not just cows. They can also be from "downer" animals, animals that are sick or dying just prior to slaughter.

You wouldn't eat this stuff yourself, so why feed it to your dog, who is a member of your family? Yes, it takes some time and effort to make your dog's food yourself, but when you do, you know exactly what's in that food. You control the quality and you control the nutritional content. You know exactly what your dog is being fed. That's more than can be said when you read those dog food ratings.