We bought XXL-sized chops from a well-known but smaller meat company from our area in Finland, close to Helsinki metropolitan area. They were about an inch thick. I’m definitely not a gourmet chef, but I can make reasonably edible food. Sometimes even good. Those chops’ relatives failed miserably.
The taste was unpleasantly old, and people felt like they had a hot stone in their stomachs after eating. Two dogs showed signs of heartburn from the leftovers an hour after eating, which is very rare for us. The meat was supposed to be of high quality, but it wasn’t.
The meat company is known for often further processing their products. They make ready-made minced meat loaves or pre-marinated whole meat. Often, a larger batch is sold at once, at a good price. I have bought their products a couple of times before because they have been extremely cheap. Those chops also cost something like 1.50 per kilo on offer – not bad. The problem is that the meat itself has always been bad. So in the future, the company’s products will end up only in our dogs’ bowls, if even there.
The first question about the chops was whether it came from a 16-year-old sow and whether the meat had perhaps traveled a bit too long from the slaughterhouse to the plate. Or where the meat originally came from at all.
It’s not uncommon in Finland for these local meat companies to end up in negative news at some point when they play around with dates.
Similarly, when the lack of quality would be revealed to the consumer in its natural form, they switch to marinades, which is also not exceptional. It’s everyday life on the retail side. So it’s not about making life easier for the consumer by soaking everything in the same red goo, but about hiding poor quality.
We’re on the same page as in construction, where it’s said that what the wall throws, the list covers.
Quality is a relative concept. The minced meat mass of ready-made meatballs is not quality meat by any measure. Nor is it in those much-advertised meaty grill sausages. Still, they taste good and serve their purpose. For people, quality means that the consumer gets what they believe they are getting and is satisfied – in food, it means taste.
The fact that people think a cloudy-eyed rainbow trout is quality because it’s edible after being in the oven a bit too long and is covered with lemon and a suitable sauce perhaps best illustrates the meaning of quality.
Easier for Dogs
The quality of dog meats is often measured by similar metrics as for humans. Similar because some demand such whole meat for their dogs at the price of feed meat that they themselves never eat so well. Occasionally you can get such, but it’s human overproduction, which is also sometimes called overflow. Then it looks the same as what is quality by human standards, but age and the cold chain cause it not to be.
A dog is a predator, a carnivore. A dog is not an omnivore, nor is it a vegan. A dog is also not a scavenger. The fact that a dog can eat oatmeal and a carcass that died a week ago in July only means that a dog is an opportunist. It eats anything to stay alive. So does the great tit. The fact that a dog can should never be a guideline that it should. Making a dog a composter is one extreme. The other extreme is giving a dog only fresh whole meat of store quality or minced meat intended for humans.
The truth is always between the extremes. The fact that a dog can be fed anything between oatmeal, a rotting carcass, or a tenderloin only provides more tools, more choices. Still, it’s worth using nails for porch cladding, not screws, although they too can drill in. Do you understand the comparison? Use the right things in the right place for the right reason.
The quality of food for dogs can be summarized in a few basic truths, and I’ll list them in a Southwestern Finnish way as negations:
- the food must not make the dog sick
- the food must not cause deficiencies in nutrients
- an expensive price does not bring quality
- a cheap price is not often good
If you want to go through positivity, in the Savonian way:
- the food must suit the dog’s stomach
- the dog must like the food in the sense that it eats
- the food must be healthy
- the owner must pay for the dog’s food with joy, or at least be able to pay for it
If feeding fails in even one aspect, then the food is not of good quality.
The Dog’s Theory
A dog should eat something called meat, which contains more than just roast. Although a dog is not a wolf, its diet also includes everything else that a prey animal offers.
For cat people, this usually doesn’t need much explanation because the idea of a mouse as a complete nutrition source has been launched there. Usually, cat people need to be slowed down because it’s not quite that simple. Similarly, dog people also need to slow down a bit because the transition to the bullshit of barf and natural live food is too easy.
In addition to meat, a dog needs a bit of indigestible tendon, cartilage, and even bone in its food. The emphasis is on the word a bit. If you want to feed your dog like a wolf (but of course without the dog doing the work…), remember a few facts:
- a wolf does not eat the stomach and intestines first; a wolf only eats them out of absolute necessity when food is scarce
- a wolf does not eat large bones; they are used to pass the time if there is enough food, and even the backbone is not eaten
- a wolf only eats the hide as much as is accidentally torn during tearing
Those parts are therefore largely unnecessary. Still, meat sellers sell food, both in dry food and under the name of meat, especially cartilage and stomach, justifying them with wolves. And people believe it because carcasses are no longer seen anywhere.
This gives us two boundary values for quality:
- bones, cartilage, tendons, hides, and stomachs are poor-quality food for dogs when there is a lot of them
- bones and cartilage are quality chews for dogs when seeking entertainment and dental care
Internal organs, such as the liver and to a lesser extent kidneys, are a dog’s superfood. They are an essential part of a dog’s diet. They can be ground into dog feed meats, which in principle improves the quality of the food. Unfortunately, often only in principle. Often the advertising of internal organs means an unknown amount of liver and a large amount of lungs and stomachs, which results in poor-quality food.
Brains would be valuable food, but food hygiene stands in the way. Thanks to mad cow disease and a bunch of other diseases transmitted through the central nervous system (and also because their collection as pure work is difficult), brains are not an option in Finland. And in countries where brains would be available, there are so many other hygiene problems that I would not agree to take other meats either (yes, I’m fully willing to compromise with Argentinian meat).
Then quality food is:
- mostly meat
- a little connective tissue and bone
- internal organs
By human standards, such a mix would be avoided like the plague and there would be complaints that you wouldn’t eat grill sausages if you saw what they’re made of. I’ve seen it, I eat it, and so do the dogs from time to time (no, grill sausage is not complete food for anyone, but it also doesn’t cause pancreatitis for the dog or the dog’s owner).
Quality for Dogs in Practice
Few of us can buy what we consider quality for our dog regardless of the price. So it’s always about compromises based on how much the food costs, how it meets the dog’s nutritional requirements, and how the food generally suits the dog’s stomach.
There are a few metrics, but their significance depends on the dog – so these are “just” things that might need to be considered, but the dog decides whether to care.
Unnecessary Scraps
If the product description mentions connective tissue, lungs, stomach, cartilage, and even bones in parentheses after the meat, it means there is little meat. Quality is therefore weak in the sense that there is little usable protein and everything else that meat offers. Instead, there’s a lot of indigestible and unusable material. For an ordinary dog, this usually means nothing more than needing more poop bags and having to put more food in the bowl. However, dogs with heartburn and intestinal problems may have serious problems.
One manufacturer explained to me that bundling all animal-derived materials into one in an animal-derived product is a matter of convenience. They get everything mixed up and don’t know what’s in the batch. Sorry, but first of all, that’s not even largely true, and secondly – thus the manufacturer said they don’t know what’s in the food and that batch variations can be ridiculous. Shall we discuss further the topics of quality and trust?
On the axis of unnecessary scraps, it almost systematically goes
- reindeer, because it has high utility on the human side and there’s not enough meat for dogs
- occasionally lamb
- most often salmon, because it’s waste from gutting (I never buy any meat that has salmon as a significant component, except as a mineral source, and never salmon-based dry food)
- deer, roe deer, and moose from hunters
High-Fat Chicken
Meat is always the same as nutrition. There are small differences with fish, white meat, and horse, but nothing significant. Everything always focuses on one thing: how much fat is in the meat. In land animals, fat is also found in the muscles, it’s that marbled grill meat. The fact that fat is found between the muscle fibers is a strongly breeding-introduced thing. In game, whether it’s deer, moose, or even wild boar, the same amount of muscle fat is not found as in their domesticated cousins, but it’s there. In birds, however, the fat is almost entirely subcutaneous fat.
This means that it’s almost impossible to make chicken mince with more than about 10% fat if it doesn’t include skin or leg portions (which on the human side is sold somewhat misleadingly under the name of roast cut, because that cut is a drumstick and hasn’t seen a roast; however, anything is sold as game). That’s why most, if not all, chicken-based minced meats are high in fat – there are also so-called good quality chicken mixes on sale, where the fat is brought in as beef or pork.
The question of skin and poor-quality carcass parts is difficult. If you buy chicken balls or really any chicken product for yourself, they’re made from exactly the same thing. But in dog feeds, the amounts are just higher because they’re made from what hasn’t gone to humans – and the pattern is also complicated by the fact that there’s human overproduction involved.
I’ve personally set a boundary with problematic dogs to absolutely avoid meats made solely from chicken with 20% or more fat (yes, those dogs also consistently have problems whenever the fat rises that high, so?). Often the boundary can be set at around 15%, give or take, where the quality of the meat improves significantly.
For most dogs, the issue is not significant, and the goal is to find food where the fat percentage allows for a reasonably sized portion that keeps the weight stable. The skin portion that comes from chicken is mostly somewhat digestible. But it’s worth keeping in mind for sensitive dogs.
Low-Fat Foods
Chicken breast is considered quality, and it is in human kitchens as meat. But it’s anything but quality dog food, precisely because of its lack of fat. It provides almost zero calories for the dog. There’s no other fault with it.
Horse has the exact same problem, but it is also less digestible than other meats when raw. The situation improves slightly when cooked. The reason is found, among other things, in the higher glycogen content of muscles than other animals, which is the storage sugar of animals and on a theoretical (and also practical) level is exactly the same as plant starch; raw potato doesn’t digest.
Pollock, used in stomach diseases and pancreatitis (and which is the single biggest factor in the poor failure of treatment), is completely useless as food. If I could decide, its sale would be completely banned for dogs and allowed otherwise only for fish’n’chips. Pollock provides good proteins, but there’s no shortage of them anyway. In terms of energy, it’s totally empty and doesn’t provide anything else nutritionally. I personally place pollock and coconut oil in exactly the same category – so if you want to give totally useless food, drizzle coconut oil over the pollock and wait a couple of weeks on that diet, and you’ll get a demonstration of how deficiency symptoms appear in the dog, even though the weight doesn’t drop.
Ground Bones
In Finland, there is practically only one feed manufacturer left that actively markets meat with bones. They have a serious attitude problem on the mental side through barf, and practical constraints come from being the only slaughterhouse feed line in the country. With other producers, the problem of meaty bones usually focuses on reindeer and salmon.
Bones themselves are not a problem, but their amount is. In fact, a small amount of bone in feed meats would only be beneficial, as long as it stays within the needs of the dogs – so quality meaty bones are obtained only when
- there is so little bone that no calcium supplement is needed with a typical portion
- there is so much bone that it can only be used as a calcium supplement and does not quantitatively reduce the amount of higher quality meat
The first option products can be found a bit in complete dog feed meats, but the second option is harder to find. Additionally, the use of meaty bones is limited by price and difficulty – why would someone pay a higher price for calcium than for meat and also have to see more effort? It doesn’t make any sense.
Mush’s bone-in reindeer falls into the category of poor-quality foods by many metrics, but let’s see how it should be used. Let’s take an example of a 20 kg dog, whose total food amount would be about 500 grams.
- The dog’s calcium requirement according to NRC would be 1300 mg
- The food contains 3190 mg of calcium per 100 g
- 40 g is needed
- Vitamin A is estimated to be 300 micrograms (4% of the ingredients), when the need would be about 600 µg.
If we double the required calcium because some of the bone is certainly not digested, the portion would be about 80 grams, but truly 100 grams, because it’s a 500 g roll, so
- 1/5 of the food would be made completely poor quality
- fat intake would decrease
- Vitamin A would be 780 <mg, when the need is about 600 micrograms
Then the real question regarding quality is whether replacing 1/5 of the food with bone-in reindeer affects the dog’s weight and causes constipation? If it does, then using reindeer makes the food poor quality. If it doesn’t, and you’re willing to chop an extra roll and pay almost 5 € a week for calcium and a small amount of liver, then it’s quality.
I have at some point fed dogs chicken mince, which later turned out to be ground bone meal from laying hens. It looked deceptively like meat, so visually assessing meat quality is almost impossible – you can see it in chunk meats (and those bumps and wattles in beef mince mean nothing other than that cheek meat has been used; ask Hannibal Lecter how they work with a good chianti). I woke up to the situation only when there was quite a bit of bone poop outside. The food was poor quality, but still, it set track records and won tough competitions – so everything is truly relative.
Quality must always be measured from the whole. So when a couple of hundred grams of liver that lasts a long time costs a few euros, plus you can turn it into vitamin balls, and a 40 kg bag of calcium costs less than ten euros, then ground bone-in reindeer doesn’t meet any quality criteria for me, especially since I would have to increase the amount of basic food, which would further increase the cost. Still, for your dog and your finances, that might be a quality option. There are never absolute truths in these (except for coconut oil and pollock).
Poor Quality Quality Foods
Not everything always has to be so perfect. Not even in terms of very subjective quality or even healthiness. Plus, because the dog and its health ultimately determine, poor quality may actually be quality.
Chicken Drumsticks
Wings are completely useless snacks, even though they are considered food in the Tampere economic area. On the other hand, they also eat black sausage there and put grilled food inside a jelly donut. Drumsticks are not even close to quality in terms of meat, but they work, and dogs often eat them in a predatory manner with joy. When drumsticks are used, for example, once a week as a substitute for a candy day, they become quality food.
The dog gets to use its teeth for eating and enjoy the act of eating as a performance.
Ready-made Liver Casserole
Ready-made liver casserole is not even close to perfect food as the only meal, but it is significantly better than its reputation. A liver casserole day once a week is never wrong, and if you worry about its low-fat content, a tablespoon or two of butter does the same trick.
Most dogs like its taste, and that’s probably why it’s often used as a birthday cake with sausage candles. A dog doesn’t understand the concept of a birthday, but for many, it’s practically the only way to get liver sometimes. Then it becomes quality food. Plus, it’s preservable, easy to transport, and even easier to buy as camping food.
Lidl Orlando’s Canned Food
Orlando’s canned food sold at Lidl, in about a kilo can, costs a couple of euros and belongs to the series whose real quality of ingredients I really don’t want to know. The price ensures that no roast is found. There’s little fat, and the protein amount is not impressive, and other nutrients are more of a joke than genuine. In the wet food market, it has even become synonymous with poor quality – just as Orlando’s dry food has dropped Lupa from its position as an example of poor food.
Orlando’s canned food is pressed into pillow-shaped pieces of overcooked stuff. The overcooking and fine grinding are probably dictated by necessity to be able to sell it at all.
But the texture and cooking make it digest well for most. Orlando’s canned food has been used successfully for some dogs with heartburn and intestinal symptoms. Plus, dogs like it – they are no more immune to wanting everything unhealthy than their owners. When such poor-quality food is the one that removes the dog’s symptoms and gets it eating again, it becomes excellent quality food.
Who Sells Quality Meat?
You’ve gotten this far and are still waiting for some list where foods are ranked in order of preference. I have such a list, but I’m not telling it to you. I’m (almost) sorry. The reason is clear. One food suits one, which takes a third to intensive care.
Meats can be ranked based on the assumed quality issues of their raw materials – we still don’t truly know what each manufacturer calls meat. They can be classified by protein or fat. Or should they be classified based on which meat mix requires more or fewer supplements? And where on the quality list do we place manufacturers and their products that present incomplete and sometimes even incorrect ingredient lists? The product may still work, at least for a healthy dog, even if the manufacturer doesn’t know what they are selling.
Do we consider quality through healthy dogs that can eat anything and ask for more? Or do we take as a criterion those with heartburn, for whom anything containing all sorts of unnecessary scraps is poor quality – until symptoms are fixed with drumsticks. Owners of allergic dogs often look for quality meaning food without allergens. If a dog is allergic to chicken, then any pork, beef, fish, or reindeer is quality – and if it turns out that even those don’t suit, then could it be possible that it’s not about a multi-allergic dog allergic to everything, but rather it would be worth genuinely focusing on the overall ingredients of the foods…
Is pork-beef quality for an overweight dog because the food doesn’t contain lungs? Or is chicken breast quality food for a skinny dog? Or is buckwheat porridge and pollock quality food for a dog with pancreatitis?
Quality and excellence are impossible criteria because they mean nothing and mean everything.
Quality must always and without exception be considered from one and only one perspective:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Quality meat suits the dog and does what it should [/perfectpullquote]
I’ll still give you a list:
- don’t buy from a manufacturer/seller who lies more than is customary in the industry, because dishonesty should not be rewarded with money
- don’t buy a product with a vague product description, because if the manufacturer doesn’t know what they are selling, they don’t know anything else either
- don’t buy a product that doesn’t list basic nutrients, because an analysis costs a few tens of euros, and if they’re skimping on coffee money, they’re skimping on other things too
- don’t buy meats used as a supplement, such as fat-free and bony ones, because they are expensive, difficult, and sometimes even dangerous
- buy very cautiously meats that are called meat when they are not meat
So the answer to the title question of who sells quality is everyone and no one.
