Alpha Spirit Mediterranean Diet Wet Sausage Wild Fish review

This sausage takes our Good band word, a step below the typical adult wet food, because wet tends to score well as a category. Read the placement against a category where the typical mark already sits high. Almost the entire recipe is fish, the analysis is protein-led with very little left for carbohydrate, and the percentages are printed where an owner can see them. Nutritional balance reads Outstanding and transparency Excellent, while protein and processing reads Good, held back by a fish entry that never says which fish.

None of that makes the recipe a compromise. It simply means the label answers the question of how much and stops short of the question of which.

Ingredients, as declared: 93% Fresh Fish, 5% Vegetables and Natural Spices.

Fresh fish at 93% carries the whole recipe. Most dogs digest fish easily, and the omega-3 oils in it are what coat and joints draw on. On a dry matter basis that comes out at 50.7% protein with 32.7% fat.

The species is the missing piece. For a dog that simply suits fish better, that hardly matters. It does leave an owner avoiding one particular species with nothing to check, since fresh fish can be any fish. It is the one place this otherwise plain-speaking label goes quiet.

The 5% vegetables and natural spices line completes the list. It is a small share and the estimated carbohydrate shows it, landing at 6.3% of dry matter where the typical adult wet food runs at 15.8%. The grouped wording does leave the maker free to vary what goes into it.

Fat converts to 32.7% of dry matter, rich enough to suit an active dog and worth weighing out for a settled one, and crude fibre is low at 3.3% of dry matter. Calcium works out at 0.63%, a settled figure for an adult.

The added panel is dosed line by line: vitamin A at 7954 IU per kilo, vitamin D3 at 509, vitamin E at 159, then manganese, iron, copper, zinc and iodine in milligrams. That is more declaration than a good many wet labels offer.

£17.11 a kilo, with the choice of a 350g sausage, a 150g sausage or four 65g sausages in a pack.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat around 544 grams a day, which comes to about £9.31, on an assumed requirement of 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate).