Merrick Help
 

I'm thinking of switching to Merrick and was wondering what you guys thought of this brand? Classic & Grain Free Recipes for Dogs | Merrick Premium Natural Dog & Cat Food

Any thoughts/suggestions are greatly appreciated :D

Some background-wolf was originally on Orijen but it was too rich for him, so we ended up with a raw food diet but lately he keeps getting bones stuck. we're obviously concerned and don't want to continue with it, so I'm looking for an alternative. I live in a very rural area but this food seems to be pretty common in stores near me.

It used to be a good food but was recently sold to P&G, at least one line of it was sold to P&G.

oh boy :( ...i really thought the grain free wet food like this looked pretty decent

any suggestions for a real good food that doesn't have any kind of "meal" as the first 5 ingredients?

There is nothing wrong with a named meat meal as one of the first ingredients and as far as I know you'll be hard pressed to find anything that doesn't use a meat meal as one of if not the primary source of meat protein.

As long as it is a named meat, like chicken meal, and the quality of the meal is good (which can usually be determined by the percentage of ash in the food) then a meat meal is more desirable as a first ingredient than just a meat. This is because the meat meal has most of the water removed in processing while the meat (like chicken or deboned chicken) consists of mostly water, so even if chicken is the first ingredient you can be sure that once it is processed that chicken is actually much farther down on the Kay of ingredients than what it appears to be.

Oh, and to add a bit more ... Merrick as far as I know has not been sold to anyone. In fact, they just bought out another large manufacturer themselves. They are still family owned as far as I am aware. Evo, and the rest of the foods made by Natura, were bought by Proctor & Gamble a couple years back, Merrick was not.