"Beef, Chicken Meal, Brewers Rice, Corn Meal, Soybean Meal, Animal Fat (Preserved with Mixed Tocopherols), Corn Gluten Meal, Brown Rice, Oatmeal, Dried Beet Pulp, Natural Flavor, Dicalcium Phosphate, Salt, Calcium Carbonate,....."
Taken from the first few lines on one of the products.
Beef. By itself not as good as it sounds. You would rather have it say beef
meal, like the second ingredient chicken meal. Meal is the term used to mean after it has been processed down into a useable protein source. Just saying beef or chicken is the whole wet weight of the ingredients before they become useable. This probably drops beef down to the fourth or fifth ingredient.
Chicken meal. This is good. This is going to be the main protein source in the food. They should just call the food Chicken something instead of Beef something.
Brewers rice. Just what it sounds like. The left over garbage rice from breweries.
Corn meal. Corn can be considered a protein source and counted in the label, it's just too bad dogs can't digest corn, or any vegetable for that matter. Their digestive tracts are too short. Corn is also one of the big three things in food that dogs can be allergic to. Another is....
Soybean meal. See corn meal. Same thing.
Animal fat. You always want the "animal" the fat came from identified, such as "chicken fat". Not identifying the source means it is probably not something you would eat yourself. BTW, poultry fat fits in this category also. You always want to see the specific animal source they got the fat from.
Corn gluten meal. The liquid from corn, but it's still corn and still one of the most common ingredients that cause allergies in dogs.
Brown rice. Yay. This is good, too. Even from a minute rice eater like me
Oatmeal. No comment. Probably put in as a binder to hold everything together and I can't say anything bad about it.
Dried beet pulp. If a good food uses beet pulp it will always say "sugar removed". That said, while some people thinks beet pulp adds needed enzymes to the lower digestive tract, most people feel beet pulp is added to dog food as a stool tightener, because something in the dog food is causing loose stools.
Natural flavor. What? All these
yummo ingredients couldn't produce any flavor on their own?
And the rest is in such small amounts they aren't all that important, so I don't bother keeping up with them all.
I'd have to say that RR, while may have had a good cause in mind, researched her dog food ingredients in what, maybe all of 30 minutes?
