That might sound like a funny statement or even a funnier equation.
If you are like 97% of people in Australia you feed your dog a manufactured dog food diet to your dog.
If you do that, you are feeding them at most 20-30% meat, and in the lower cost brands, that might be mostly gristle and poor quality offal (not human grade).
Offal is a very important part of a dog’s diet (nutritionally), but if it isn’t human grade, then why would you feed it safely to your dog? The reason that offal in dog food usually isn’t human grade is that if you go to your butcher you will find that it usually costs more than human grade meat! And as almost all dog food manufactured dog food is made for the cheapest price, any kind of meat or offal is usually the cheapest cut.
Dog meat from your supermarket isn’t good meat
If you are feeding your dog meat at all, it is probably because somewhere you might have read that they are a carnivore, which is true.
So you trust the manufacturers to provide you exactly what your dog needs, dog meat right? Wrong.
If you were worried about your dog not getting enough proper protein (meat based) in its commercial dog food, then you have good reason to be.
But if you are feeding your dog “dog meat” from the supermarket, do you know how much meat is actually in that product and what the quality is?
The rule of raw diet foods for dogs is that they are meat, and you can see what the whole meat looks like. Once the meat is blended with anything and recomposed you have no idea of what the quality of the meat was, or even how old it was. How much grain and flour was added what are the secret herbs and spices?
Unfortunately, a lot of labelling laws for dog food are very lax. They might show you what the order of the percentage of ingredients is, but even if the dog food has meat as the first ingredient, it still might only make up 20% of the total food, even if it is called “dog meat”.
Why bother feeding ‘dog meat’ rather than real meat to a dog?
Dog meat typically isn’t 100% meat, otherwise, it would just be called meat. You can even be charged more for this fake meat “dog meat” than you are for real meat – because of marketing costs and mark ups for the unwary.
All that “dog meat” might have, besides a lot of filler, is a bunch of artificial vitamins (to keep the price down) and minerals, so that it can reach the artificial aafco standard to be allowed to be called dog food.
This, unfortunately, means that often dog food rolls can be worse for your dog than regular ‘premium’ dog food in pellet form!
If you want to feed your dog meat, feed them human meat, If you are worried it doesn’t have enough minerals and vitamins in, research good vitamin and mineral tablets to add.
But it is usually easier and often as cheap (if you buy through our healthy dog treat store) to add meat based dog treats to your dog’s diet– and you can do so up to 25% without affecting the bare minimum affco requirements for minerals and vitamins.
The bonus of course is that you will be getting your dog amino acids derived from meat, to make up for the low protein requirements that affco created to allow dog food companies to pass off low meat based bags of grain as dog food!
