Take a second look and inspect the pet food ingredients in your home.
Here’s what some of those confusing terms mean.
Poultry meal : is the homogenized combination of poultry guts, chicken beaks, and chicken feet.
If you see poultry meal on the product label, then it means there is no trace of chicken meat included.
Meat meal : is the mechanically rendered product from mammalian tissues “exclusive of any added blood, hair, hoof, horn, hide trimmings, manure, stomach and rumen contents except in such amounts as may occur unavoidably in good processing practices.”
Animal byproduct meal : is the mechanically rendered product from animal tissues “exclusive of any added blood, hair, hoof, horn, hide trimmings, manure, stomach and rumen contents except in such amounts as may occur unavoidably in good processing practices.”
Other parts : are the 4D tissues.
4D tissues consist of “meat that came from animals that were dead, dying, diseased or disabled before they reached the packing plant.”
This is equivalent to saying that feeding your dog with a pus-ridden chunk of meat from a farm that has been plagued by animal disease is acceptable.
These animal parts are waste materials from human food processing plants.
One may staunchly rationalize that cats and dogs eat these waste parts of prey animals in the wild.
But dogs and cats do not discard the bones, liver, and meat of their prey animals and selectively eat only the unpalatable parts in hefty proportions.
As for the supposedly healthy pet food ingredients and the nutritional supplements, anyone who has been trained in food processing knows that the mere act of processing robs the food of its nutritional value.
Moreover, the product naming conventions of the AAFCO are tweaked by pet food manufacturers.
There’s a 95% rule and a 3% rule.
The 95% rule states that if a specific pet food ingredient have to appear in the product name, such as “Beef for Dogs” then the ingredient (beef) ingredient must be at least 95% of the product.
The 3% rule involves the use of the word “with.” As long as the food ingredient after “with” comprises 3% of the contents, then the AAFCO will allow it to be placed on the product label.
So, that “Dog Food with Chicken” (which contains 3% chicken) alongside a properly labeled pet food product “Chicken Dog Food” (which contains 95% chicken) can be sold to unknowing pet owners anywhere in the United States.
This is why raw dog foods are far safer and healthier, you know exactly what they are before you feed them to your pets.