Country Pursuit Maintenance review

The Poor band here is earned almost entirely on what the label declines to say. Our scoring rewards a label that says what is in the bag, and this one keeps its contents to itself: cereals, meat and animal derivatives, derivatives of vegetable origin. Protein and processing and nutritional balance both read Poor as a result, and transparency reaches no further than Average. What that does and does not mean is worth spelling out. Category terms cover the very best ingredients as well as the very worst, and some good makers use them to protect a recipe. Dogs have lived long, busy lives on food written this way. What you cannot do is check, and checking is precisely what the score measures.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, Meat & Animal Derivatives, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin, Oils and Fats, Fish and Fish Derivatives, Vegetable Protein Extracts, Minerals.

Cereals heads the list, and the word covers everything from whole oats to the plainest wheat feed. It also allows the mix to change from batch to batch as supply and season dictate, so the grain your dog eats in spring need not be the grain they eat in autumn. Most dogs cope with that perfectly well. A dog with a specific grain problem cannot risk it.

Meat and animal derivatives follows, a legal term covering the fleshy parts and processing products of slaughtered warm-blooded land animals. That takes in genuinely good material as well as poor, and there is no way from the outside to tell which is here. Further down the list, fish and fish derivatives explains why fish appears on the allergen reading.

Vegetable protein extracts is the entry that shapes the analysis most. Extracted plant protein counts towards the 21.5% headline while doing less for a dog than the same figure from meat would, so the protein number is better read as a ceiling than as a promise. Derivatives of vegetable origin, another broad term, sits above it in the list.

The fat side is the leanest thing about the recipe. Fat is 8.5%, or 9.2% of dry matter, with carbohydrate estimated at 56.6% of dry matter, so the energy comes mostly from starch. For a dog that piles weight on at the sight of a biscuit, that combination is genuinely useful, and 347 kcal per 100g means a decent-looking bowl for the calories.

The one part of this label printed in full is the additive panel. Vitamins A, D3 and E are all declared. The trace elements are all dosed per kilo: zinc at 100 mg, iron at 50 mg, manganese at 20 mg, copper at 15 mg, iodine at 2 mg and selenium at 0.1 mg. Whatever the main list withholds, the micronutrients are complete and stated.

£2.40 a kilo, sold in 15kg and 3kg bags, with a 300g sample size for a first try.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats around 242 grams a day, or about £0.58. That works from the standard maintenance estimate of roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75).