Myths and facts about dog and cat pellets - What is the real meat content of pellets?

Meat in pellets is an often discussed concept and for most dog and cat owners also one of the main criteria when choosing them. But what is the reality of meat in pellets and does the average owner even have the opportunity to judge the quantity and quality? The term meat in the conventional sense includes the skeletal muscle of slaughter animals. However, it is mainly animal by-products not intended for human consumption that are used for the production of pellets. Under current legislation, they must come from healthy animals slaughtered for human consumption. They only contain parts that are not used for food production, but can provide animals with enough valuable nutrients. In broad terms, therefore, meat in pellets includes not only muscle but also other parts of animal tissues such as ligaments, tendons, blood vessels, etc. Bones are also often part of the animal raw materials in pellets and their proportion can be estimated partly from the total ash content. The ash in the feed is the sum of all inorganic (mineral) substances and its main source, apart from mineral supplements, is the bone residues in the animal ingredients. Ash contains a number of valuable minerals, but if its content is too high, it also reduces the usability of the feed and may indicate a lower quality of the animal raw materials used. Meat is present in pellets in fresh or dry form. The dry form (meat meal) has a very low water content, up to a maximum of 10 %. In contrast, fresh meat can contain up to 80 % water. The fresh meat content of pellets is beneficial in that it undergoes less extensive heat treatment than meat meal and there is less heat damage to the protein. On the other hand, however, it must be taken into account that the total proportion of meat in the pellets is reduced quite substantially once the water has evaporated. The decisive indicator for assessing the quantity of meat in the granules is therefore primarily its content in the dry state, in the form of meal. If the manufacturer states the proportion of fresh meat at the beginning of the list of ingredients, this is meat with the original moisture content. For a realistic assessment of its proportion in the feed, it must be converted to dry matter content, where its actual proportion comes out roughly 3 to 5 times lower. Therefore, with a quoted fresh meat content of 50 % in the pellets, we can expect a real meat content in the dry matter of 10-15 %. When converting the meal content into meat, the opposite can be done. If the manufacturer indicates a total meat meal (dried meat) content of 30 % in the pellets, this is the same as using 900-1500 g of fresh meat to produce 1 kg of pellets, depending on its actual moisture content. However, the quantity of meat ingredients alone is not indicative of the quality of the granules as a whole. The quality of the protein contained is also a decisive indicator, which is determined mainly by the proportion of essential amino acids and their digestibility. These characteristics cannot be assessed by the average consumer; the declaration of the raw materials used may be a basic guide. Here, quality sources should be declared as single-species raw materials with a precise indication of the species from which they originate, i.e. chicken meal, not poultry meal, or salmon meal, not fish meal.

MVDr. Eva Štercová, Ph.D.