Gelert Country Choice Performance Adult: Chicken review

This one lands in our Good band, which is also where the typical adult dry food settles, so read it as the middle of the market with a specific job to do. The named chicken and the printed fresh meat percentage pull it upward, while the cereal share, the unnamed poultry fat and the undosed joint pair keep it level. None of that changes what the recipe is for. Fed to a dog in regular work, the fat and the calories are the whole point, and it delivers them without fuss.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken Meat Meal (30%), White rice (26%), Barley, Poultry Fat, Sugar beet pulp, Freshly Prepared Chicken (6%), Potato Starch, Dried Brewer's Yeast, Linseed, Chicken Liver digest, Minerals, Seaweed, Prebiotic MOS (Mannan-Oligosaccharide), Yucca extract, Glucosamine, Chondroitin, Cranberry).

Chicken meat meal at 30% is the backbone of this food. The word meal means the meat was dried and ground before it reached the mixer, so that 30% arrives more or less intact in the finished kibble. The 6% freshly prepared chicken behind the rice is mostly there for flavour once the water has gone. Chicken liver digest does a similar job at the far end of the list, and liver is a genuinely nutrient dense ingredient in its own right.

White rice at 26% and barley carry the starch, with potato starch helping the kibble hold together. Carbohydrate finishes at 46.7% of dry matter and protein at 27.2%, but the figure that defines this recipe is fat at 16.3% of dry matter, which is what lifts it to 366 kcal per 100g.

The added fat is written as poultry fat rather than chicken fat. It is a perfectly ordinary ingredient and it carries the taste dogs chase across a yard. Chicken, turkey, duck and goose all count as poultry, though, so a dog held strictly to chicken cannot lean on this line.

Sugar beet pulp brings fibre for the gut and mannan oligosaccharides act as a prebiotic behind it, while seaweed adds iodine and a spread of trace minerals. Linseed is the plant omega 3 here, and yucca extract is the long standing kennel answer to the smell that comes with a run full of working dogs.

Minerals are declared inline as a single word, so there is no dosed panel to inspect, and glucosamine, chondroitin and cranberry are all listed without amounts. Calcium works out at 1.74% of dry matter, which is fine for a grown dog and worth a thought only if a growing large breed is ever fed from the same sack.

£2.91 a kilo, sold in a 12kg bag.

This is an energy dense recipe, so a 15kg dog in moderate condition needs only about 230 grams a day on a maintenance estimate of 840 kcal (110 × bodyweight^0.75). That comes to £0.67 a day. A dog in genuine work will eat rather more than that, so feed to condition rather than to the arithmetic.