Alpha Spirit Imperial Wet Sausage Poultry review

Placing this one is easy: our band word for it is Excellent. What is worth adding is that the typical adult wet food carries the same band word, because wet scores well as a category, and this sausage still finishes clear of that typical mark. Naming both birds is a large part of why, and so is an analysis that leaves almost nothing to carbohydrate once the moisture is stripped out. Its protein and processing reads Excellent, while nutritional balance and transparency both reach Outstanding.

Ingredients, as declared: 95% Fresh Poultry (Turkey 50%, Chicken 45%), Beet Fibre, Collagen, Parsley, Turmeric, Thyme.

The headline says 95% fresh poultry, and the bracket underneath does the work the word poultry usually avoids: turkey at 50%, chicken at 45%. Those two add up to the full claim, so no third bird is sheltering behind the category term, and protein converts to 48.8% of dry matter.

Turkey is the senior partner and an easy meat for most dogs. It is gentle on digestion and naturally leaner than chicken. Chicken fills out the rest and brings the palatability that has made it the most used meat in the trade. That same familiarity is why chicken heads the list of meats dogs become intolerant of. A dog with a chicken history is better served by one of the other Imperial sausages.

Beet fibre and collagen follow the meat. The beet fibre is a modest, gentle fibre source rather than a bulking agent, which shows in an estimated carbohydrate of 1.7% of dry matter against 15.8% for the typical adult wet food. Collagen is connective tissue protein, a natural thing for a dog to eat. Its animal is not named on the pack.

At trace level the list closes with parsley, turmeric and thyme. They give the sausage its character and nothing more, and none of them is a reason to choose or to avoid the recipe.

Fat converts to 38.0% of dry matter, which makes this a rich sausage that suits a dog with a fast metabolism and asks for a weighed portion from a settled one. The nutritional additives are all dosed in print: vitamin A at 7954 IU per kilo, vitamin D3 at 509 and vitamin E at 159. Manganese, iron, copper, zinc and iodine are given in milligrams, and calcium works out at 0.63% of dry matter.

The figure is £17.11 a kilo, with 350g and 150g sausages on the shelf alongside 65g ones sold in fours.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat about 510 grams a day, which is around £8.73. That assumes a requirement of 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate).