Arkwrights Complete: With Beef review

Both varieties finish in our Poor band, a fair distance beneath the Good band that the typical adult dry food occupies, with protein and processing, nutritional balance and transparency all reading Poor. The driver is openness rather than danger. Unnamed cereals, unnamed species behind the derivatives, protein at the modest end and carbohydrate at the high end give a label reader almost nothing to verify, and our scoring marks that silence down hard. None of it means dogs fare badly on the food; generations of them have not.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, meat and animal derivatives (minimum 10% beef), oils and fats, minerals

Cereals leads the list, and the word can cover any grain there is, from excellent oats to the lowest grade wheat leavings. The quality is unknowable from the outside and the mix is free to change from batch to batch.

Meat and animal derivatives is the legal catch all for animal material of any kind, and here it comes with one fixed point: a declared 10% of the named meat in each variety. That minimum is the only part of the animal content an owner can actually check.

The analysis tells a carbohydrate story. Protein reads 18% as fed, 19.8% in dry matter, while the estimated carbohydrate clears 60% of dry matter in both varieties against a typical 46.2% for adult dry food. This is an energy feed built on grain, in the old working feed tradition.

The additive panel is more forthcoming than the ingredients list. The trace elements are dosed identically across both varieties: zinc at 150 mg/kg, iron at 80 mg/kg, manganese at 45 mg/kg, copper at 10 mg/kg, iodine at 1.5 mg/kg and selenium at 0.2 mg/kg. It is a small window of precision in an otherwise closed label.

Beef holds the named slot here, declared as a minimum of 10%. The red meat variety reads slightly higher in ash at 8%, and its vitamins are dosed at 15000 iu/kg of Vitamin A, 1500 iu/kg of D3 and 110 mg/kg of E.

£1.62 a kilo whichever meat you choose, in 15kg bags, 4kg bags and a multipack of four 4kg bags.

The usual maintenance arithmetic is 110 kcal per kilo of metabolic bodyweight. On that basis the beef comes to about 267 grams a day for a 15kg adult in moderate condition, at £0.43, and the chicken to about 261 grams, at £0.42.