Fleischeslust Sensitive Sausage: Pure Horse review

Two of the four recipes arrive in our Outstanding band and the other two in our Excellent band. They all get there the same way: one named animal at 75%, a plant list of one or two entries, and protein between 37.3% and 51.6% of dry matter. Wet food does well on our scoring, and the typical adult wet food carries an Excellent band itself. The interesting part is how far above that middle mark these four land. Protein and processing reads Excellent on all four recipes, the duck included.

Ingredients, as declared: 75 % horse (offal, meat), 11 % broth, 8.5 % potato, potato starch, minerals, yucca root, 0.2 % safflower oil, eggshell meal.

Each recipe declares 75% of one animal and names the parts used, so Fresh Farmers Duck is duck meat, stomachs, hearts and liver, and nothing else animal appears further down. That matters more than it sounds. Unnamed fats, fish oils and category terms are what usually break an exclusion diet, and none of them turns up here. Even the added oil is named on every label, rapeseed on the duck, linseed on the turkey and safflower on the horse and lamb.

The starch behind the meat changes with the recipe and stays small. Sweet potato goes on the turkey, potato on the horse and lamb, apple and amaranth on the duck, with potato starch as the binder throughout. Amaranth counts as a seed, not a grain. On the duck recipe it lifts fibre to 3.1% of dry matter, the highest of the four. Carbohydrate across the range converts to between 17.9% and 22.7% of dry matter.

Every label puts a percentage on the broth, between 9% and 11%, and the water content is accounted for in print. Moisture itself runs from 70.8% to 75.1%, which is simply what wet food is and part of why these recipes suit a dog that never drinks enough.

Eggshell meal and a mineral premix do the calcium work, landing between 0.86% and 1.2% of dry matter across the four, and yucca root appears on every list. There is nothing decorative in these recipes at all, no botanical flourish and no supplement panel to talk about. That is exactly the point when the aim is to find out what your dog can tolerate.

Horse offal and meat at 75% with potato at 8.5%, safflower oil for the fat and an eight-item list in total. It is the leanest of the four at 21.0% of dry matter fat and the highest in protein at 51.6%, and the only recipe here also sold in a 200 g size.

The everyday sizes are 400 g and 800 g, and Pure Horse adds a 200 g. Trays hold 16 of the 400 g, 12 of the 800 g and 15 of the 200 g. Lean Turkey and Pure Horse are both £10.61 a kilo.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition comes to about £7.56 a day on the turkey and £7.77 a day on the horse, or roughly 712 and 732 grams. Those figures rest on about 840 kcal a day, the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. On the same basis the duck recipe comes to 644 grams a day and Pure Lamb to 609.