GAIN Museli review

Our reading puts this in our Poor band, well below the Good band where the typical adult dry food finishes, and the named pieces are not quite enough to move it. The weight of the general terms is what counts against it. Cereals, meat and animal derivatives, vegetable protein extracts and derivatives of vegetable origin between them describe most of the bag, and none of the four can be graded by anybody reading the pack. The 4% minimums that are printed are small shares of the whole, welcome as they are. No band can measure your own dog, and one eating well on this and holding condition is telling you something the label cannot.

Ingredients, as declared: Cereals (min 4% rice in the orange piece), Meat & animal derivatives, Chicken (min 4% beef), Vegetable protein extracts, Oils & fats, Derivatives of vegetable origin, Vegetables (min 4% potatoes and carrots in the orange piece), Minerals, Products from the processing of plants

The orange piece is the point of the product and the label backs it with figures, a minimum of 4% rice inside it and a minimum of 4% potatoes and carrots. Carrots are a genuinely good thing to find in a dog food, bringing vitamin A, soluble fibre and natural antioxidants, and cooked they are easy for a dog to digest. Potato is starch first and foremost, doing structural work more than nutritional.

Chicken and beef both appear by name with a 4% minimum attached, which is a real disclosure in a recipe of this type. Both are digestible, palatable meats that most dogs do well on. The catch is the heading immediately above them, meat and animal derivatives. That heading covers the fleshy parts of slaughtered warm-blooded land animals and the products of processing the carcass, and it is tied to no species at all.

Vegetable protein extracts is the entry to read twice. It is plant protein of an unnamed kind, used to bring the protein percentage up, and a dog does less with plant protein than with the protein it takes from meat. Because the plant is never given, it also leaves soya, maize and wheat all in play, which matters if any of those is a question for your dog.

Protein 21.0%, fat 10.0%, fibre 3.0% and ash 7.5% are the declared figures. Taking the usual 8% moisture for a kibble to convert it, that is protein at 22.8% of dry matter and carbohydrate at an estimated 54.8%, against 46.2% typical for an adult dry food. The plant side is doing the heavy lifting in this bowl.

Cereals and derivatives of vegetable origin close the picture out, both of them broad enough to move with supply from one batch to the next. Read for what it is, this is an everyday feed with a mixed texture, a couple of named meats and a handful of printed minimums. It is honest about the pieces it chooses to describe.

Sold in 3kg and 15kg bags.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would take about 251 grams a day on this recipe, working from around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The feeding table on the pack puts a 7kg dog at 150 grams and a 50kg dog at 625 grams, and your dog's shape should settle anything in between.