Autarky Adult Grain Free Wet: Luscious Lamb review

All three of these belong to Excellent, the band that also holds the midpoint of the adult wet shelf. They finish within a hair of one another, so nobody is choosing between a strong recipe and a weak one here. Every one of the three reads Outstanding on nutritional balance and transparency, with protein and processing Excellent throughout and value reading Excellent alongside it.

The reason the three hold up is the 66% of freshly prepared animal on every one of them, backed by an analysis that converts to at least 40.0% protein once the moisture is stripped out. Carbohydrate is modest too, running from an estimated 18.0% of dry matter on the chicken down to 4.4% on the salmon, where the typical adult wet food sits at 15.8%.

Ingredients, as declared: Freshly Prepared Lamb (66%), Potato Meal (5%), Dried Peas (0.9% equivalent to 3% peas), Dried Carrots (0.4% equivalent to 3% carrot), Dried Potato (0.5% equivalent to 2% potato), Minerals, Dried Broccoli, Dried Tomato, Dried Apple, Rosemary (0.1%), Parsley (0.1%), Oregano (0.1%), Thyme (0.1%), Fish Oil, Sunflower Oil, Dried Seaweed, FOS, Glucosamine (0.004%), Chondroitin (0.002%), Cranberry, Yucca Extract, Yeast Extract.

Every label opens the same way, with freshly prepared chicken, lamb or salmon at 66%. Freshly prepared means the meat is weighed in its raw, wet state, so it contributes less to the finished recipe than the number first suggests. That is true of every wet food that declares fresh meat, and it is not a sleight of hand. It does explain how a recipe can read as two thirds meat on the label and still declare 10.0% protein in the analysis.

The plant side is deliberately small. Potato meal at 5% does most of the starch work. Dried potato at 0.5% stands in for 2% of fresh potato, dried peas at 0.9% for 3% of peas and dried carrots at 0.4% for 3% of carrot. Peas in whole form bring fibre, antioxidants and a useful spread of vitamins, and carrots are an easy source of the same. Broccoli, tomato and apple follow at trace level.

Then come the herbs, each printed at 0.1%: rosemary, parsley, oregano and thyme. Rosemary does real work here. It is a natural antioxidant, and it keeps the fats from turning rancid. Owners of epileptic dogs sometimes prefer to avoid rosemary as a precaution, which is easy to check against a label that prints the figure.

Fish oil and sunflower oil supply the added fats, and the fish oil is the reason none of the three recipes is entirely free of fish. Fish oil is a good source of omega-3 and omega-6 and it earns its place, but a dog on a fish exclusion needs to know it is there. Dried seaweed adds minerals including iodine. FOS is a prebiotic fibre, food for the gut's friendly bacteria.

Glucosamine at 0.004% and chondroitin at 0.002% close the recipe, printed honestly at the levels they are actually used. Those are small numbers and the label does not pretend otherwise. The added panel behind them is properly dosed. Vitamin D3 at 328 iu, vitamin E at 26 mg and zinc at 24 mg lead a trace element list that runs on through iron, copper, manganese, iodine and selenium.

Freshly prepared lamb at 66%, and like its stablemates it reads Excellent on protein and processing. Its ash converts to 14.0% of dry matter, the highest of the three, which usually points to a little more bone in the mix, and its estimated carbohydrate lands at 14.0% of dry matter. Energy comes to an estimated 111 kcal per 100g.

£4.43 a kilo across all three recipes, in a single 395 g size sold by the 12.

As a guide, feeding works out at between £3.25 and £3.49 a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, depending on which animal you choose. The basis is about 840 kcal a day for that dog, the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. That corresponds to roughly 734 to 789 grams a day.