Cooper & Co Senior review

Our reading puts Cooper & Co Senior in the Good band, and the typical adult dry food finishes in that band as well. What lifts it is not clever: half the label given over to one named fish, a starch load under what dry food usually carries, and a mineral panel that prints every dose it adds. Nothing here is showy, and for a dog in their later years that is rather the point.

Ingredients, as declared: 50% Trout (Freshly Prepared Trout (34%), Trout Meal (12.5%), Trout Oil (3.5%)), Sweet Potato, Chickpeas, Lentils, Peas, Beet Pulp, Salmon Gravy, Minerals, Brewer's Yeast, Salmon Oil, Dried Seaweed, Chondroitin Sulphate, Glucosamine, Fructooligosaccharides, Mannanoligosaccharides

The label puts trout at 50% and then breaks that apart properly: 34% freshly prepared trout, 12.5% trout meal and 3.5% trout oil. Most of the water in fresh fish goes in the oven, so the meal at 12.5% ends up doing more in the bowl than its position on the list lets on. The analysis backs the construction up. Protein converts to 30.4% of dry matter and estimated carbohydrate to 44.5%, where the typical adult dry food runs at 46.2%.

On the plant side sweet potato comes first, with chickpeas, lentils and peas behind it, and no cereal at all. Whole pulses like these bring fibre, a spread of minerals and a useful lift of plant protein along with their starch. They are also an easy way to build volume in a bag. Here they sit behind the fish, where you want them. Beet pulp adds the steady fibre that keeps stools firm.

Glucosamine and chondroitin sulphate are both on the list, the pair most owners reach for when an older dog's back end starts to feel its age. Dried seaweed brings iodine and trace minerals. B vitamins come from brewer's yeast. Fructooligosaccharides and mannanoligosaccharides close the recipe as prebiotics for the large intestine. The honest catch is that neither joint entry carries a printed figure, so their position near the end of the list is all a reader has to go on.

The added panel is dosed in full: zinc at 48 mg, iron at 48 mg, manganese at 34 mg, copper at 12 mg and iodine at 0.96 mg per kilo. Methionine at 476 mg and L-carnitine at 481 mg sit alongside them. Carnitine is the entry that helps the body put fat to work. On a recipe aimed at dogs whose exercise has eased off, that is a sensible thing to see. The zinc is declared as a sulphate, a form a gut works slightly harder on than a chelate. The rest of the trace minerals are given as doses without their forms named, though at least every amount is there in black and white.

One point of honesty about the fish. Trout is the named species and it carries the recipe, but salmon gravy and salmon oil both appear further down. If you are working through a strict single-species trial, this is not the food to run it on. As a recipe with no land meat in it at all, it still suits a dog being kept clear of chicken, beef and lamb.

£7.30 a kilo, sold in 1.5kg and 10kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats about 242 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at £1.77 a day. The label's own table asks 150 to 250 grams for a dog between 10kg and 20kg, so let the waistline settle any gap between the two.