Exe Valley Essential Range Adult: Lamb review

All four settle in our Good band, the same band the typical adult dry food occupies. The large breed chicken leads the group, with the lamb, the salmon and the turkey a little behind it. The recipes explain the split. Meat meal at 26% over a base of rice, barley and oats produces estimated carbohydrate of 49.5% to 52.2% of dry matter in those three, above the 46.2% typical. The chicken changes the arithmetic by pushing its meal up to 35%, which brings carbohydrate down to 40.8% of dry matter and protein up to 32.6%. All four are honest, complete foods, and the scoring is simply rewarding the one with more animal in it.

Ingredients, as declared: Lamb Meal (26%), Rice (26%), Barley, Oats, Rapeseed Oil, Linseed (3%), Lamb Gravy, Beet Pulp, Alfalfa (1.5%), Minerals, Seaweed (0.5%), Chicory (0.3%).

Meat meal is the starting point here, not fresh meat, and there is a genuine advantage in that. Meal has had its water driven off long before it reaches the mixer. A declared 26% of lamb meal still reads close to 26% once the kibble is finished, and a fresh meat percentage would shrink a long way. The trade is that meal is a rendered ingredient rather than a cut, and the label tells you the species without telling you much else.

Rice at 26% shares the base with barley and oats in the lamb, the salmon and the turkey, all three named in their own right and none hidden behind the word cereals. Most dogs find rice the gentlest of the three, and barley and oats bring more fibre along with them. The chicken rewrites that base, taking maize as its second ingredient and dropping rice to 14%.

Rapeseed oil supplies the added fat in the lamb, the salmon and the turkey, a plant oil that measures up well against the other vegetable oils. Linseed at 3% adds omega 3 in its plant form. Alfalfa at 1.5%, seaweed at 0.5% and chicory at 0.3% round those labels off, with the seaweed there largely for iodine and the chicory for the inulin that acts as a prebiotic.

The chicken is the odd one out on fat as well, taking poultry fat where the others take a plant oil. Poultry fat is a good, palatable animal fat that dogs go for readily. Poultry is a family though, not a species, and chicken, turkey, duck and goose all sit under it. On a bag whose front says chicken, that is worth knowing before you use it to puzzle out a sensitive dog.

The vitamin and mineral panel is printed in full and reads the same on every bag. Vitamin A at 12000IU, vitamin D3 at 800IU and vitamin E at 60mg. Then iron at 80mg, zinc at 40mg, manganese at 25mg, copper at 13mg, iodine at 1.4mg and selenium at 0.15mg per kilo. The metals arrive as sulphates and the selenium as sodium selenite, the older inorganic forms, where newer labels favour chelates. They do the job; a dog's gut simply takes them up a little less readily.

Moisture is not declared anywhere in this range. Every dry matter figure quoted here works to the 8% dry food standard, and the energy figures are our own estimates from the analysis, none of them lifted off the bag.

Lamb meal at 26% with rice at 26% beside it, plus alfalfa at 1.5% and linseed at 3%. Protein comes in at 20%, 21.7% of dry matter, the lowest of the four. Lamb stays one of the easier red meats for a dog to digest, and that makes this the gentlest option in the range.

Per kilo, the lamb is £2.92, the chicken and the turkey are £3.17 each and the salmon is £3.58. All four come in 2kg and 12kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats between 242 and 253 grams a day of these recipes, assuming about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at £0.74 a day on the lamb, £0.77 on the chicken, £0.80 on the turkey and £0.90 on the salmon.