CSJ Sooper Dooper Champ review

This recipe settles into our Good band, the same place the typical adult dry food sits, and it arrives there on a fairly even set of readings. Protein at 30.4% of dry matter is a genuinely useful figure and carbohydrate at 44.6% is a shade under the 46.2% typical. Holding it level are the wheat and maize in the top three and the combined meat declaration, which is why protein and processing reads Good rather than higher, while transparency reads Excellent. A dog with no cereal sensitivity gets a sound everyday food here, and that is what this was built to be.

Ingredients, as declared: Beef & Chicken meal (34%), Wheat, Maize, Chicken fat, Chicken liver, Beet pulp, Linseed, Alfalfa, Minerals, Yucca schidigera.

The lead entry is a combined beef and chicken meal at 34%. Meal is the dried, concentrated form. A third of the recipe arriving as pre dried meat is a real meat share. The catch is that the two animals are declared as one number, so how much is beef and how much is chicken stays unknown.

Wheat and maize take the second and third slots, and the starch comes from them. Both are dependable kibble cereals that most dogs handle without trouble. Keep wheat in mind where a dog has had trouble with grain before, since it is the cereal most commonly involved when that happens.

Chicken liver is the entry a fussy dog will thank the maker for. Liver is exceptionally nutrient dense, carrying vitamin A, B12, copper and iron in quantity, and it is about as palatable as an ingredient gets. The chicken fat above it does much the same job for taste while supplying the energy.

The omega 3 here comes from linseed, in its plant form. A dog's body converts that to the skin active forms slowly, and a coat will take a few weeks to answer. Alfalfa adds plant protein and fibre, and beet pulp handles the rest of the fibre. The yucca schidigera at the end is in there for what your dog leaves in the garden rather than for nutrition.

The mineral panel is dosed in print, and nothing a complete food must carry is missing from it. Zinc at 125 mg/kg stands out as a generous figure. Selenium is sodium selenite at 0.1 mg/kg, and of the two forms European pet food allows, that is the commoner one. Calcium is not declared, and if you were considering feeding a growing dog from the same sack, that is the figure you would be missing.

Sold as a 15 kg sack, at £1.78 a kilo.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat roughly 245 grams a day to hit about 840 kcal, using 110 × bodyweight^0.75 as the maintenance estimate, and that puts the running total around £0.44. Treat the arithmetic as a guide, because the energy figure behind it is estimated and not declared. CSJ's less active guide asks 140 to 240 grams for a dog between 10kg and 20kg.