Is grass-fed lamb better than grain-fed lamb for dogs?

The honest answer is that it's a real difference, just a modest one. Lamb that spends its life on pasture eating grass and clover tends to carry a better balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fats than lamb finished on grain in a feedlot, and the meat is usually a bit leaner. Those fats matter for skin, coat and general condition, which is why omega-3 gets talked about so much in dog nutrition.

What grass-fed doesn't do is change the fundamentals. Lamb is a good digestible red meat with useful iron and zinc whether it grew up on grass or grain. Your dog isn't going to detect the paddock. So if you see a bag charging a big premium purely on the words "grass-fed", be a little sceptical about what else is going on inside it.

Here's the New Zealand wrinkle: our sheep are raised outside on grass as a matter of course, not as a special programme. So in an NZ-made food, grass-fed lamb is close to the baseline rather than the headline. The more useful questions are how much lamb is actually in the recipe, whether it's named as lamb rather than lumped in as "meat meal", and what's built around it. That's where bags genuinely differ.