Kangaroo and fish dog treats, what colour do you expect?
What colour is Kangaroo dog treats
Similar to chicken dog treats, the kangaroo dog treats colour becomes a little bit of a mystery. When you eat kangaroo meat steak at a restaurant it is a brown like cow steak. It becomes darker the longer it is cooked but also will be different colours depending on subspecies. Though only a few roo species are allowed to be culled for human and pet consumption. Well done steak, either beef or roo ends up almost black because the meat is turning into charcoal.
However you will find almost EVERY treat in the world that is beef or roo (and not 100% meat) will have chicken added to it to extend the size of the treat while maintaining meat content. If you buy supermarket beef treats sure you might get ONLY beef in it, but the total meat might only be the same as dog food – ie 30%.
While blackdog and other genuinely healthy dog treat brands will ‘subsidise’ their more costly meats such as beef and roo with chicken, you are at least getting that magical 80% total meat for bio availability and meat enzymes.
It is because of the addition of chicken and grain (light coloured foods), that a kangaroo dog treat (that is not 100%) will usually require a small amount of food colouring to make it the expected brown colour.
NOTE that 100% roo is naturally dark brown in colour and has no other additives or colours added.
What colour are FISH dog treats
This might seem like a trick question, as you might expect that nobody expects fish to be a certain colour (unlike people who expect anything chicken to be artificially yellow).
The reason its a trick question is that I don’t currently carry anything in fish dog treats that is not 100% fish in the dog treat range. And that means not only does the meat not have preservative, it also doesn’t have any artificial or added colouring.
However because the fish dog treats I sell are naturally caught out at sea (not farmed), even within a species they can change dramatically in colour with every batch. The processor might also cut them into different sized chunks, revealing different textures as light reacts differently off the surfaces.
The unfortunate thing in the human world is that while we might delight in new season fruits like apples etc, we all expect a lot of herbicides to be used (or at least expect our apples to have NO blemishes, as a result of pesticides and herbicides). And supermarkets seem to only select fruit for selling that looks all of the same for a specific brand of apple, or orange etc. And that is unlikely to vary throughout the season. Non Organic Navel oranges tend to look like navel oranges each and every year because of controlled cultivation, and pesticides.
Organic fruit is known to be better for humans, but costs mean that it makes up a very small percentage of sales. However counter to the dog treat industry, organic fruit can look as unique and odd shaped within a batch as can be, and its thought to be more authentic (the opposite of mainstream non organic fruits).
In dog treats, humans seem to prefer their treats to be like a fast food product (the same colour and size every time). Perhaps this is because of the extremely artificial nature of their dog food pellets shape and colour?
So this is why a few consumers balk at the look of natural (100% organic) fish dog treats – especially if they don’t look exactly the same as the original picture that was taken of them when they were first sold on a site.
It will take a lot of re-education to alert dog treat purchaser to the fact that organic, non preservative, Truly natural dog treats tend to vary a lot in colour, texture and even chunk size depending on the catch and how the manufacturer processes them. People should rejoice in buying dog treats that have a lot of natural variation, knowing that it might also mean some healthy natural variation in the protein (amino acid levels), providing a healthy variation in their dogs nutrition.