Quote: james gunderson

it is my understanding that lamb is the easiest on the stomach - although my dog seems to have no problem consuming most any thing.

Dogs are scavengers (but are designed to eat meat and bones), so for most dogs, "no problem consuming most anything" is natural.

Lamb has a reputation that hangs on for being good for a sensitive-stomached dog, and I think that the reputation started when lamb was still novel enough (a couple or three decades ago) to serve many dogs as an elimination diet for food sensitivity and allergy testing.

"Novel" in this sense means "never before eaten," so of course lamb is no longer a usual elimination diet; most dogs have eaten it. "Novel" these days is more likely to be buffalo, ostrich, elk, rabbit, etc., depending on the individual dog.

Anyway, lamb has no special traits beyond that for sensitive stomachs. It's in many "sensitive stomach" commercial foods simply because the extremely common commercial food meats (chicken and beef) are much higher on the common-allergen list (because food allergies are a repeated-exposure thing).

A dog with no food allergies or food sensitivities will do well on a variety of protein profiles. The big points for me are that they need animal protein and that grain protein is not what dogs are designed to process.

Heaven forbid if I ever have to find a novel protein for my dogs...! It's almost a game for us to find new and different things to rotate into their diet. They've eaten at one time or another nearly every beast available to be eaten--so far the only thing they flat-out refused was octopus. (Can't say I blame them much on that.) ;-)

Danke was not thrilled about alligator patties.
She only ate them after liberal application of salmon oil.