Barking Heads Fat Dog Slim Wet: Chicken review

This reads Excellent on our scoring, which is a strong showing anywhere and a particularly good one for a weight food, because trimming calories usually means trimming the meat along with them. Here it does not. Outstanding is the reading for nutritional balance and for transparency, with protein and processing Excellent. The label names its chicken, counts it, then lists real vegetables behind it instead of a category term. Adult wet food sits in the same band as a category, so this one is in good company. What lifts it above a plain slimming recipe is that a dog eating less of it is still eating properly.

Ingredients, as declared: 85% Chicken includes - Fresh Deboned Chicken (60%), Chicken Broth (25%), Courgette, Carrot, Sweet Potato, Tomato, Seaweed, Lucerne, Green Lipped Mussel Extract, Parsley, Celery, Chicory Root, Turmeric, Aniseed, Green Tea, Minerals

The label unpacks that 85% headline, and it is the best thing about this list. Fresh deboned chicken makes up 60% and chicken broth 25%, and the broth is counted openly. Protein converts to 42.9% of dry matter, a genuinely meat-led reading for a wet food, and chicken is the only meat in the pack.

Courgette, carrot, sweet potato and tomato make up the plant side, and they are doing very little of the heavy lifting. Carbohydrate converts to an estimated 9.0% of dry matter against the 15.8% typical of adult wet food. That is unusually low. Crude fibre goes the other way at 7.6% of dry matter, which is a useful thing in a food meant to leave a dog feeling fed.

Fat is the figure that surprises people on a diet food, converting to 31.0% of dry matter. This is not a low-fat recipe in the way a prescription slimming diet is. What makes it a weight food is the energy density, an estimated 93 kcal per 100g against the 97 kcal typical for adult wet food, so a full-looking bowl carries a little less than usual.

Behind the vegetables sits the Barking Heads herb garden: seaweed for its minerals and iodine, lucerne, parsley, celery, chicory root for the inulin that feeds gut bacteria, turmeric, aniseed and green tea. None of it is quantified and all of it is at the small end, so buy the food for its chicken and treat the rest as a bonus.

Green lipped mussel extract is the one entry a household with a seafood-sensitive dog should notice. It is a shellfish, and joint supplements have used it for years. Apart from the chicken, nothing else in the pack comes from an animal. Keep that in mind on a strict single-meat trial. The added panel is short and fully dosed: vitamin D3 at 450 IU, vitamin E at 40 mg, zinc at 30mg, manganese at 2mg, copper at 0.4mg and iodine at 0.3mg.

£6.25 a kilo, in 300g packs sold in cases of 10, 20, 30 and 40.

Taking 840 kcal a day for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the usual maintenance estimate), that comes to about 899 grams a day and around £5.62. On wet food alone, the label asks 450 grams a day at 5kg and 1200 grams at 30kg. A dog actually being fed to lose weight would sit under a maintenance ration anyway.