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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

This I don’t get. Why does a pet need ‘premium’ meat cuts? They live <20 years. It’s not like fat, sinew and gristle is going to cut their lives short. And if they get the innards and less tasty bits, I mean, isn’t that what wild dogs eat?

Like the dogs give two licks about the cut of meat. I’m sure they’d like some marrow.

What they probably don’t enjoy is the filler stuff.

Dogs aren’t connoisseurs of meats. They will eat any meat. Sure they avoid skunk and maybe other meats foul to their tongues, but cow, horse, sheep, etc? They like them all.

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> This I don’t get. Why does a pet need ‘premium’ meat cuts?

They don't. This is a market exploiting the fact that a lot of pet owners care strongly about their pets' well-being. Pet owner communities are full of people who insist all mainstream pet food is garbage and packaged cancer, and that you're a bad person if you buy them. There's a lot of social pressure - which I believe is in large part manufactured on purpose by marketers - to buy premium foods.

Like all other animals, including humans, many pets can get suddenly sick, and suffer a lot before they die. Pet owners tend to know it (even if they avoid thinking about it), so it's trivial to exploit this latent fear - "you wouldn't like to make your pet sick because you're buying processed food". Literally the same strategy that's used to push overpriced "healthy", "natural" human food.

>Literally the same strategy that's used to push overpriced "healthy", "natural" human food.

Would you describe yourself as a particularly healthy person?

Healthy enough. My non-optimal body shape has more to do with genetics and bad habits around anxiety management, than with not being obsessed about the most expensive granola I could find in a "healthy food" specialty store.

I don't get why a human needs "premium" meat cuts. There are so many parts of the animal that are delicious and overlooked - brains, livers, bone marrow etc. simply because people in the West from about 1950 onwards have had this weird aversion to eating any meat except skeletal muscle unless it's presented as processed food.

True. But at least people develop a taste and preference. At one time I ate liver because I was poor. I never liked it. My sibling liked it. One of my relations loved tripe. I did not.

But dogs? Until quite recently they are scraps.

Premium dog food isn't about meat cuts.

My dog reacts very differently from different kinds of meat and quality, so does her skin.

Also I can't believe to your argument about lifespan and diet. Can only be a troll.

Premium pet foods generally have more meat protein in relation to fillers like grains and legumes than other pet foods . They don’t include what we would call “premium cuts”.

> They live <20 years. It’s not like fat, sinew and gristle is going to cut their lives short.

I don't think I follow, why couldn't their lives be cut short by potentially bad food?

It takes time for a bad diet to catch up to animals of relatively short lifespans.

But the effects of bad food are also accelerated. I noticed a huge difference just in a few months after switching my cat from dry to wet food after years.

He'd started to get fat and wasn't really active or anything at 5 years old. He was having trouble breathing, drinking water constantly. Within a few monthw of switching his food, he was down to a normal weight, running and jumping around again.

I didn't change the amount of food or anything i was giving him, just the quality of it.

My rescue dog was having trouble learning until I cooked her an egg for the first time. It's pretty hard to grow a brain out of whatever garbage she was finding to eat.

I'd hazard a guess any prime cuts that might end up in animal feed is likely product that spolied in some way, or had son kind of packaging defect, as to make it not suitable for human consumption.

And / or, there's plenty of offcuts generated in preparating prime cuts that could still he called prime.

Fun fact: in Europe all pet food is safe for human consumption.

It's too legally expensive dealing with the fallout when a child tries to eat dog food and claims they got sick otherwise. It's cheaper for the manufacturer to just show up in court and say "it's certified for human consumption".

It also means that equipment can be swapped between making pies and making dog food.

"Premium" in pet food doesn't mean better cuts of meat, it means less fillers and grain.

> They live <20 years

Crazy thing about nutrition, eating better means living longer :)

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