Tasty Tuesday: Merrick Backcountry Jerky Treats

Working with Chewy.com is one of the highlights of my month. I get to try out some great new products with my dogs or cats, and then I get to share them with all of my readers. Yes, I get a product provided to me in exchange for writing a review. But the opinions of those products, those are all me.

With that said, this month, I tried out Merrick Backcountry Jerky treats, in the Pacific Catch Real Salmon variety. Now, in interest of full honesty, I will tell you straight off that these treats stink. Bad. I mean, they don't smell off or like something is wrong with them. They just smell very, very fishy. So if you are super sensitive to smells, you might want to skip these or try one of the other flavors. However, stinky treats certainly have their place. Super stinky treats are a great high value, attention getting treat for dogs who need extra motivation to engage in training. The dog can smell the treats extremely well, and may work harder to earn them since they smell so good.

The texture of these was really nice. It was easy to rip into smaller pieces to use a small treats. I brought them along to a flyball tournament this past weekend, and used them for Koira's warm up routine, which involves both static stretches as well as active stretches and warm ups, like touching nose to hip on each side, using a treat to lure the behavior and encourage length of time on the stretch. She also bows, sit pretty and waves, backs up, spins both directions, and does a few other tricks. The point is both to warm up to prevent injury, and also to distract her enough that she doesn't lose a bunch of energy barking impatiently to go into the ring.

Koira chilling in my chair after racing 

I didn't actually get a chance to grab pictures of the treats themselves. They just look pretty much like jerky, and the strips are about as long as my hand. The bag has a good number in it, plenty for warm up and cool downs all weekend, plus some extra treats here and there because she looks so cute.

Overall, I'd recommend these treats. They aren't super expensive at $8.99 right now, though they aren't a rock bottom price either. But they are made with good quality ingredients and are a pretty high value treat for most dogs. I tried them on Koira, of course, but also a few of the other dogs on my flyball team, and everyone loved them. And despite the strong smell, I didn't feel like they left my hands smelling nasty after handling them, which is a plus.


And sorry for the quality of the pictures from the tournament. These ones were grabbed with my cell phone, because Koira was being just so cute.