Countrymans Countryman's Greyhound Maintenance 20% review

This lands in our Poor band, two bands below the Good band the typical adult dry food occupies. Almost all of that gap comes from what the label chooses not to say. Every working entry names a category and never an ingredient, so there is no reading the quality of the meat or the grain. Protein and processing, nutritional balance and transparency all come back Poor because of it. That is a comment on the writing of the label. Nothing about the sack itself is a warning. Plenty of sighthounds have been kept in steady condition on exactly this kind of plain maintenance ration.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals, meat & animal derivatives, derivatives of vegetable origin, oils & fats & sodium chloride.

Not one entry on this list names an actual ingredient. Every one of them is a category. Cereals opens the recipe. That one word covers everything from good whole grains to the poorest grain by-products. Nothing tells you which is in the sack, and nothing obliges the maker to keep the same one from batch to batch. Some genuinely decent foods use the term to protect a recipe, so it is not proof of anything poor. It is simply a door left shut.

Meat and animal derivatives applies the same idea to the animal side. It is a legal category for the parts of a carcass left once the cuts bound for human food have been taken. The material inside it ranges from good clean organ meat to much less appealing offcuts. No species is named, which is the part that matters most to an owner managing a sensitivity.

Derivatives of vegetable origin sits behind the meat. It can be almost anything left over when grains, vegetables, legumes or oilseed are processed. Oils and fats is the fat entry with neither the source nor the animal given. Sodium chloride, plain salt, is the one thing here that says precisely what it is.

The analysis tells a plainer story than the ingredients do. Protein is set at 20% and fat at 8%, which convert to 21.7% and 8.7% of dry matter, a gentle mix for a dog that is resting rather than racing. Moisture is not declared, so those conversions assume the 8% a kibble of this kind normally carries. Carbohydrate lands at 56.5% of dry matter where 46.2% is typical for adult dry food. Energy is estimated at about 320 kcal per 100 grams against a typical 357. Read together, those figures describe a food built to keep a lean dog level.

£1.17 a kilo, sold as a 15kg sack and also listed as a case of six.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works through about 262 grams a day on around 840 kcal a day. That is the standard maintenance estimate, 110 × bodyweight^0.75, and it comes to £0.31 a day. A racing or coursing dog in season will eat more than that, so treat the figure as a starting point.