Bayou Blend Blueshit

Blue Buffalo is a scam dog food company that cocks up over-priced dog food for gullible rubes with too much money.

As I have noted, in the past, Blue Buffalo is a howling liar who thinks its consumers are idiots and who ended up paying $32 million for their lies in order to avoid paying even bigger fines.

The latest bit of excrement from this company is "Bayou Blend" which is made of the guts and bones left over from skinned and de-fleshed alligators (farmed or wild) and whatever part of the catfish that is left over after the fillets have been cut out (skin, head, guts, tail, bone).

One of the main ingredients is shrimp meal, which is mixed in with an odd assortment of exotic-sounding but low-cost and mechanically harvested farm produce: sweet potatoes, peas, potatoes, blueberries, cranberries, and carrots.

In short, this is just regular old dog food with an exotic sounding label and a jaw dropping price: $54 for 22 pounds.

The search for exotic-sounding proteins is quite humorous: duck, quail, salmon, turkey, rabbit, goat, tuna, bison, venison, guinea fowl, beaver, kangaroo, and ostrich for example.

These are foods cocked up for people who foolishly buy inbred Kennel Club dog with skin issues.

The funny part is that the dog's skin problems may not even be due to a food allergy; it's that the owner is tossing Febreze and other toxic chemicals from one end of the house to another while not washing the dog once a week with a decent pyretherin-based dog shampoo. You think it's a miracle I've never had a dog with a skin issue? It's not!

Intrigued by the term "shrimp meal," however, I looked that stuff up. My guess is that the supplier is IQI Pet Food which says that:

For North Sea shrimp we go all the way to Morocco. That’s where the shrimps are peeled, and that’s where we came up with the idea of creating this exclusive premium meal. Teaming up with some of the biggest shrimp processors, we’ve managed to turn an otherwise useless product into a valuable claim-ingredient.

I used to live in Tangier, Morocco, and I assure you that "North Sea Shrimp" do not come from Morocco. These are small brown-grey shrimp harvested by Dutch trawlers in the North Sea and sent to Morocco where low-wage sweat-shop workers peel them and the hard shells and stray bit of leg and guts, which are waste, are tossed into a bucket where they are carted off to be dried and (apparently) made into dog food.

No problem here, but don't you love the term "valuable claim-ingredient"? It's not a valuable ingredient. It's a "valuable CLAIM-ingredient".  The value is in the name claim, not the stuff itself.  It sounds so exotic! Consumers of Bayou Blend probably think their dogs are eating Shrimp Scampi rather than "mud bug" legs and shells.

And speaking of bugs, is that the next thing to go into dog food?

I notice that IQI Pet Food says it sells insect meal for pet food.

The benefits of eating insects are multifold. They’re tasty, nutritious and packed with protein. And what’s more, you can grow and harvest the product in a completely controlled environment. By doing so, and by offering you our first self-bred product, IQI takes the lead in product innovation.

Again, no problem here. My dogs dined out for weeks on Brood X cicadas the last time they erupted around here, and they actually gained a pound or two. Food is food, and dogs lick their own butts and eat their own poop. Let's not get too precious about dog food, eh?

That said, if a company will lie to you about another company's dog food, and does not know what is going into its own dog food, and is charging consumers three times more than they should for the privilege, I would consider other options. Blue Buffalo will never have a customer in this house.