Meat Content in Dog Food
Meat content in dog food: why "80% meat" is mostly water
The biggest number on a dog food bag is often the least useful. Here is how to read meat content properly, with the maths, and the figure that actually tells you what your dog gets.
The problem with the headline number
Fresh meat is around 75% water. A recipe that starts with 80% fresh chicken, once it has been cooked and dried into kibble, contains far less chicken by weight than the bag implies, because the water has gone. The label is not lying; it is describing the ingredients before cooking. But it invites you to compare a fresh-meat percentage on one bag with a dried-meat percentage on another, and those are not the same thing.
The maths. 100 g of a recipe with 80 g fresh meat and 20 g dry ingredients loses most of the meat's water in drying. Roughly 20 g of meat solids remain alongside the 20 g of everything else. The finished kibble is closer to half meat by weight than to 80%.
The number that matters: animal protein as a share of total protein
What your dog needs from meat is protein, specifically the essential amino acids it cannot make itself. So the useful question is: of the protein in this food, how much comes from animal sources? In Happy Dog dry food, animal sources make up up to 90% of the total protein. That is what "meat first" means when it is measured after cooking rather than before.
More meat is not better meat
Past the point of covering the dog's requirement, extra protein is not stored as muscle. It is burned for energy or excreted, and excreting it is work for the kidneys. Vets recommend reduced, high-quality protein for dogs with kidney disease for exactly that reason, and a moderate rather than maximal protein level for senior dogs generally. The right amount of a digestible protein beats a large amount of any protein.
Which meat, and how many
For most dogs, chicken, lamb, beef and fish are perfectly good proteins. The reason we make recipes with ostrich, kangaroo, goat and horse is that around one to seven per cent of dogs develop a food allergy, and it is nearly always to a protein they have eaten a lot of. Three quarters of allergic dogs react to beef, dairy or wheat; a quarter to chicken, soya or lamb. A single-protein recipe with a meat the dog has never eaten is how vets test for and manage that. Food allergies explained.
The same logic is why our single-protein recipes contain one animal source throughout, including the fat and the flavouring. "Single protein" on a bag that lists chicken fat in the small print is not single protein.
How to compare two bags
That is the amount of protein in the finished food. For an adult dog, the low twenties is typical; puppies need more.
The composition list is in descending order by weight before cooking. Animal ingredients near the top, with the water status stated (fresh, dried, meal), tell you more than a percentage.
Digestibility shows in the stool: small, firm, not much of it. A highly digestible food with 22% protein puts more into the dog than a poorly digestible one with 30%.
How to read the rest of the label.
Based on guidance from the Happy Dog veterinary team and on "The young dog: key aspects of dietetics" by Nicola Rinn, veterinarian.
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