LUNG: Organ or Muscle meat.. or popcorn? :P

On the cat forum, there is a fun discussion going on about what exactly LUNG is.

Is it a secreting organ (5%), or is it muscle meat (80%)?

There were arguments for and against, I am torn.

While I do not believe it is actual muscle meat, I also wonder about the secreting organ issue.. someone quoted it as "the popcorn of raw" because it offers little to no nutritional value (when compared to other organs/meats).

I think we can all agree it has it's place in our pets diets, but what place is that exactly?

It is organ. Have you ever felt lung? It is very squishy and foamy.. not like a muscle at all. Heart and stomach are the only two internal parts considered muscle.

Search for lung

See, the texture alone to me is what makes it NOT muscle meat.. I agree.

Ah, but it doesn't go through a dog like liver and kidney does. I feed as meaty meat but don't use it as much as I would say for example heart.

Liver, kidney, lung, pancreas, brain.. none of that goes thru my dog!

Heather, I'll try and explain myself better.

When I feed liver or kidney I have to be careful not to feed too much or it makes stools softer and looser too fast (since I only feed bones every few days there is progression in stool consistency anyway). When I feed lung it seems to be digested like meaty meat.

I've only fed brain as part of whole heads, and pancreas as whole prey, so I can't comment on them.

It could just be that lung is more air than tissue and liver and kidney are more dense. It's still considered organ though but it's irrelevant because everyone feeds what they do according to bowel tolerance. I can feed Amos an entire half pound of liver and he'd have formed poop.. maybe just a LITTLE soft. I couldn't judge what is and isn't organ based on that criteria.

Yes, lol, based on that criteria, fruit is organ, that goes through Charlotte immediately, if I don't catch her eating it!!

Muscle has the ability to move acting on impulses from the brain, organs move when muscles move them, not on their own, I don't know any other criteria to separate the two. As a body system, the cardiovascular system in particular, the heart is often referred to as an organ, but it really is muscle, as the cells can contract and expand. No other criteria exist for classification of muscle that I can think of. Lungs expell air and inflate when the diaphragm (a muscle) expands and contracts, the lungs themselves aren't moving so much as inflating like a balloon.

As to runny poos, kidney never bothers us, but chicken liver, if too much, does sometimes cause cannon butt. Funny though, seasoned pork doesn't bother her...

Thinking about it further . . .

Maybe lung's just the body part where the bone/meat/organ divides fall down. A grey area (as opposed to grey matter, which is organ). Cartilage is another body part for me that doesn't quite fit into bone, but doesn't fit into any of the other categories. The reason I don't quite count it as bone is because whilst it's not a 'soft organic' part of the body, neither is it strictly speaking bone. It's not calcified into bone yet [goes to check reference] [why can I not find the text that explains bone development?], anyway, it's not strictly bone as it's mineral composition isn't that of bone, it's separate. So whilst it's not strictly bone/organ/meat, it is a body part, especially as wild carnivores tend to pick off the young at certain times of year. So it has a place in the diet for that reason, but it's not bone/organ/meat. So maybe lung is the same? It's not muscle/meat, but neither is it composed like liver/kidney/brain. As lovely as it is to be able to divide prey into bone/organ/meat it is only ever going to be a simplification of the body and therefore some body parts are going to defy being categorised as such.