Alpha Spirit Imperial Wet Sausage Wild Fish review

Our band word for this sausage is Good. Wet food does well on our scoring as a category and the typical adult wet food reads Excellent. The honest way to read the placement is that this one sits inside a strong field and does not lead it. Nutritional balance reads Outstanding and transparency Excellent. Protein and processing reads Good rather than Excellent, and the unnamed fish is the single reason for the difference.

Ingredients, as declared: 94% Fresh Fish, Beet Fibre, Collagen, Parsley, Dill, Rosemary, Basil, Paprika.

Fresh fish at 94% is essentially the whole recipe in one entry. Fish of this kind is highly digestible and naturally rich in the omega-3 oils that coat and joints draw on. It converts to 51.4% protein and 35.7% fat on a dry matter basis, a serious analysis for something sold as a sausage.

What the pack will not tell you is which fish. Species matters to some dogs and to some owners, and this entry keeps it to itself, so a household avoiding one particular fish has nothing to check against. For a dog that simply gets on better with fish than with meat it makes very little practical difference.

Beet fibre does the gentle work on stool quality and collagen adds connective tissue protein. Between them they leave estimated carbohydrate at 1.5% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%, so almost nothing in this sausage is anything other than animal. Collagen's own source is not declared either.

Parsley, dill, rosemary, basil and paprika finish the list at trace level. The rosemary is doing antioxidant work, keeping the fats from turning. That counts for something in a recipe carrying this much fish oil.

The added vitamins and trace minerals are printed with doses: vitamin A at 7954 IU per kilo, vitamin D3 at 509 and vitamin E at 159, then manganese, iron, copper, zinc and iodine in milligrams. Calcium works out at 0.68% of dry matter, which is where an adult dog wants it.

£17.11 a kilo. The formats are a 350g sausage, a 150g sausage, and 65g sausages sold four to a pack.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat around 563 grams a day, or about £9.63, assuming roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate).