Dr Clauders Hyposensitive: Venison & Potato review

Two of these five land in our Good band, the same band the typical adult dry food occupies, with the other three a little below in our Average band. One pattern explains all of it. An exclusion diet buys its short ingredient list by leaning hard on a single starch, and potato at or near half the recipe leaves less room for meat than a general-purpose kibble carries. Judged as a tool for working out what your dog can eat, and not as a meat-first food, the range does the job it was made for. The herring is the one that manages both at once.

Ingredients, as declared: Potato flour 47%, deer protein (dried) 15%, potato protein, beet pulp, deer meat 5%, chicken fat, linseed, vegetarian protein hydrolysate, monocalcium phosphate, potato starch, fish oil, drClauder´s Pro Digest 5 Complex 0.75% (yeast, papaya powder, pineapple powder, cranberry powder, yeast beta glucans, inulin (FOS), spirulina powder, hemp flour), chicory powder 0.73%, yeast, (dried, incl. 0.05% glucans), calcium carbonate, sodium chloride, thistle oil.

The construction repeats itself every time: potato first, one named animal second, beet pulp for fibre, then a small tail of oils and gut ingredients. That shape is entirely deliberate. The fewer things in the bowl, the fewer suspects there are when something disagrees with your dog.

The catch is in the fats. Poultry fat appears in the duck, the mini and the salmon, chicken fat in the venison, and fish oil in most of them. That leaves the herring as the only recipe whose animal content stays within one family. For everyday sensitivity that is rarely a problem, but if a vet has you running a strict trial, those are the lines to read twice.

Pro Digest is the range's own gut blend of papaya and pineapple powders, cranberry, yeast beta glucans, hemp and spirulina, with inulin in some versions. Only the mini goes without it, which leaves it on four labels of the five. At below 1% it is there for support and not as treatment.

Potato protein, and in the herring dried peas, do some quiet topping up of the protein figure behind the meat. Plant proteins do not match meat for amino acid quality, so they are better read as making up numbers than as the reason a protein declaration looks the way it does.

Every label in this range declares its vitamins and trace minerals in full, dose by dose. Plenty of kibbles at any level fail to manage that. Chicory powder runs throughout as a source of inulin for the gut bacteria.

Deer is the draw, with dried deer protein at 15% and deer meat at 5% over potato flour at 47%. It is the one label in the line that adds seniors to the adult recommendation. Chicken fat and fish oil sit behind the venison, so it is a novel-protein recipe and not a venison-only one. Protein converts to 23.1% of dry matter with the lowest carbohydrate of the five at 52.4%, and thistle oil closes the list.

Per kilo, the salmon and the venison are £5.71, the duck £5.94, the herring £6.77 and the mini duck £11.60. The four full sized recipes come in 3.5 kg and 11.5 kg bags, the mini in a 2 kg bag.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition wants about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at £1.42 a day on the salmon, £1.44 on the venison, £1.49 on the duck, £1.67 on the herring and £2.87 on the mini duck. Those calorie figures are estimates from each analysis, since none of these labels prints one.