Yesterday on this blog I was looking at EC permitted colours and the longevity of these once consumed by your dog. I was shocked to learn about illnesses and even deaths in some cases.
Wagg dried dog foods is the latest food I have been asked to review. For me to review any dog food it needs to pass a number of tests before it even gets close to my dogs mouth.
Firstly when given the bag of Wagg Complete Worker Chicken and Vegetables dog food was to look closely at the labelling and packaging. In the ingredients it states that Wheat is the first ingredient not unlike other dried dog foods but then it does go onto meats, in this case "Meat Meal".
So what is meat meal? For one there is no such thing as human grade meat meal. Fact. This is because meat meal is never produced for human consumption. This however does not mean though that everything labelled "Meat meal" is of low quality. It is difficult to say because by law dog foods do not need to say what quality there meats actually are. Wagg states that their meat is human grade quality but this does not include the ingredient-Meat meal it only includes the meats that are added. If an ingredient list includes "Chicken meal" it could be from high quality de-boned chicken breasts or from old battery hens with little muscle or quality meat. Unfortunately for us Wagg chooses not to say, although it does include it as their sixth ingredient. A good tool to use is look at Ash in ingredients, if the ash content is quite low then the proportion of bone to meat is also low. In this case it is 8.5%. Quite high.
Wagg says on their web site "we do not use any artificial colours or flavours in their dog foods and in their complete dried dog foods the meat is of human grade". All 4% of it in this case.
For me to open the bag and give it to my dog Wagg need to make their labelling a lot clearer and remove the meat meal from their products. Then and only then will my dog actually try it!!
