Chicken Meal/ other meat meals ??

[Clauzilla]

I have a question for you, maybe some of you have talked directly to the companies and have a first hand answer......

I do not like feeding a meal based food because most meals are made at a rendering company and then purchased for use in dog foods, you have no idea what if any preservatives were put in and what quality the meat was, also meat sent to rendering companies must be de-natured and this is not something I want to feed my dogs.

I home cook most of the time but there are times when I need to feed a kibble.
But I called one of the major compaies Natura and asked them if they cooked their own meat and made their own meal and the girl could not answer this question for me, I have e-mailed them and not gotten a reply. I feed the Karma as I know this is made in an USDA organic facility and the rules are much stricter than a regular dog food plant, also on the package it says safe for humans to eat.
But on the natura site it says their chicken meal is from rendered chicken, so have any of you asked them this question and gotten a response.
Mnay of the otehr top foods are also meal, I have found rendering companies that sell their chicken and turkey meal to dog food producers, but also they make animal meal and such and you can't tell me that one run would be completely clear of the other run etc.. also this is where they buy chicken fat and fish meal etc,
PLease let me know as I only want to feed the least processed foods to my 5 dogs.

thanks
Claudette

 

[Mordy]

just like with many other ingredients, there are differents in the quality of meat meals. just because it's a rendered product doesn't mean it's automatically bad quality.

what you don't want is any sort of meat meal with a generic name that does not indicate the species it came from, such as for example poultry meal, fish meal, meat meal, meat and bone meal and so on. these products are made from multiple ingredients and can include all kinds of unsavory stuff.

it is also not correct that all meats sent to rendering facilities have to be denatured, only materials that did not pass inspection and are declared as unfit for human consumption for one reason or another. this is the material that ends up in "generic" meals.

companies that make high quality food also use high quality meat meals that are made from clean, first-rate ingredients, for example the same chickens that would otherwise end up in a grocery store for human consumption.

not all companies that manufacture meat meals produce low-quality garbage you have to be concerned about. "rendering" refers to the manufacturing process of grinding down, cooking, separating fat and solids and then dehydrating materials and it isn't a process that automatically results in a food ingredient you have to be concerned about.

also keep in mind that all the dry foods that only list fresh meat as an ingredient don't contain much meat at all, since the ingredients are sorted by descending weight before processing, when the meat still contains 70% water or more, which is removed during the manufacturing process. this way you end up with only about 1/4 of the amount of usable protein in the product, the rest is mainly grains - not an ideal diet for a dog.