What’s All that Stuff in the Ingredient List?
Here is a description of various ingredients that you might see in many pet foods. This is from AAFCO….. You may be surprised!
Meat is the clean flesh derived from slaughtered mammals and is limited to that part of the striate muscle which is skeletal or that part which is found in the tongue, in the diaphragm, in the heart or in the esophagus; It shall be suitable for animal food.
Meat Meal is the rendered product from mammal 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. If the product bears a name descriptive of its kind, composition or origin it must correspond thereto., ie. Chicken meal, duck meal, lamb meal, etc.
And what you find in many other brands of pet foods carried by competitors:
Poultry By-Product Meal consists of the ground, rendered clean parts of the carcasses of slaughtered poultry such as necks, feet, undeveloped eggs and intestines, exclusive of feathers except in such amounts as might occur unavoidably in good processing practices
Corn distillers’ grains – the residual grains or byproduct that contain the nutrients remaining after the starch from corn has been fermented to alcohol.
Animal Digest – material which results from chemical and/or enzymatic hydrolysis of clean and undecomposed animal tissue. The animal tissues used shall be exclusive of hair, horns, teeth, hooves and feathers, except in such trace amounts as might occur unavoidably in good factory practice and shall be suitable for animal feed.
Brewer’s Rice – the dried extracted residue of rice resulting from the manufacture of wort (liquid portion of malted grain) or beer and may contain pulverized dried spent hops in an amount not to exceed 3 percent.
Corn Gluten Meal – the dried residue from corn after the removal of the larger part of the starch and germ, and the separation of the bran by the process employed in the wet milling manufacture of corn starch or syrup, or by enzymatic treatment of the endosperm.
Dried Animal Digest – dried material resulting from chemical and/or enzymatic hydrolysis of clean and undecomposed animal tissue. The animal tissue used shall be exclusive of hair, horns, teeth, hooves and feathers, except in such trace amounts as might occur unavoidably in good factory practice and shall be suitable for animal feed.
Poultry Digest – material which results from chemical and/or enzymatic hydrolysis of clean and undecomposed poultry tissue.
