Gelert Sporting Dog Variety Tins review

Good is where this tin comes out, one step below the Excellent mark the typical adult wet food reaches. The analysis is not what holds it there. Protein at 40.0% of dry matter and carbohydrate at an estimated 20.0% are perfectly respectable figures for something fed from a tin, and protein and processing reads Good with nutritional balance Outstanding. Transparency stops at Good, and the reason is on the label. Four meats are named at 4% each, and everything else is written in the legal category terms that let a maker move the mix around between batches without reprinting anything.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and Animal Derivatives (Chicken 4%), (Beef 4%), (Lamb 4%), (Turkey 4%), Cereals, Minerals, Derivatives of Vegetable Origin.

Meat and animal derivatives is a legal umbrella that covers the fleshy parts and by-products of warm-blooded land animals. It can describe anything from very good material to very ordinary material, and the label gives no way of telling which. Gelert does at least pin four species to a number, with chicken, beef, lamb and turkey each at 4%, so a defined slice of the tin is accounted for by name. The rest is taken on trust, and plenty of long-established British tinned food is sold exactly that way.

The plant side is described as cereals and derivatives of vegetable origin, both of them broad terms that can be met by different materials from one batch to the next. The cereal is doing a fair amount of the work here, with carbohydrate converting to an estimated 20.0% of dry matter against the 15.8% typical for adult wet food. That carbohydrate figure is calculated by difference and not measured. On a label as sparse as this one it inherits every rounding in the printed analysis.

What the analysis does say is reassuring enough. Protein at 40.0% of dry matter is a strong number for a tin, fat at 25.0% is moderate rather than rich, and ash at 12.5% is unremarkable. Moisture is declared at 80.0%, which is simply what a tin of this kind is, and it is part of why a working dog will need a good volume of it.

No separate additives table is published. Minerals appear as a line in the composition, which tells you a supplement has gone in but not which vitamins or trace elements it covers or at what dose.

£1.87 a kilo, in 400g tins sold twelve to a case.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at around £1.71 a day, or roughly 913 grams. Behind that sits an energy assumption of about 840 kcal a day, the standard maintenance figure of 110 × bodyweight^0.75.

For its weight, wet food carries few calories, so daily amounts on a tin like this look large next to a dry food. Plenty of owners spoon it over a smaller dry portion.