Country Pursuit Original review

Our scoring reads labels, and this label offers five words to read. Cereals, derivatives of vegetable origin, meat and animal derivatives, oils and fats, minerals: not one tells you which plant or which animal. Protein and processing reads Poor because of it, though nutritional balance still comes back Average. The Poor band follows from the same silence. None of that means the food will not suit a dog, and generations of working dogs have done well on rations written exactly this way. It means the bag asks you to trust it where a named list would let you check for yourself.

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

The order of the list is the most informative thing on it. Cereals come first, then derivatives of vegetable origin, and only after those two does any animal material appear. Ingredients are listed by weight, so plant matter makes up the greater part of this recipe, which is consistent with an analysis showing carbohydrate at 52.2% of dry matter.

Meat and animal derivatives is the legal term for the fleshy parts and processing products of slaughtered warm-blooded land animals. It stretches from very good material to very poor, and there is no way of telling which is in a given bag. The same applies to oils and fats, a term that covers everything from a fine poultry fat to the least appealing tallow, and it means the fat that gives this food its energy is unidentified.

What the analysis does show is a food with a bit of push behind it. Protein is 23%, or 25.3% of dry matter, and fat is 12%, which converts to 13.2% of dry matter, a good deal more generous than a maintenance ration. At 357 kcal per 100g the energy matches what a typical adult dry food carries, so a dog working hard gets what it needs from a sensible-sized bowl.

Moisture is declared at 9%, which is more than the ingredient list gives away and does at least mean the dry matter figures rest on a stated number. Fibre is modest at 2.5% and ash at 6%, both of which read as a straightforward, digestible cereal-based recipe.

The additive panel is the part of this label that spells everything out. Vitamins A and D3 open it, with vitamin E following at 100 mg per kilo. Every trace element is dosed too: 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. The micronutrient side of this food is complete, dosed and open, whatever the main list withholds.

£2.40 a kilo, available in 15kg and 3kg bags alongside a 300g sample size.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition takes around 235 grams a day and works out at roughly £0.56. That comes from a maintenance estimate of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75). A working dog burning more than that will need a bigger scoop.