Growling Tums Senior/Light review

Our score puts this in the Average band, a step below the typical adult dry food in Good, and the first ingredient is the reason. Rice at 33% with barley after it means cereal, not meat, is the biggest thing in the bag, and carbohydrate at 60.9% of dry matter runs well above the 46.2% typical of a dry food. Transparency reads Outstanding against Poor readings for protein and processing and nutritional balance. The label is doing its job even where the recipe is plain: percentages against the two lead ingredients, a mineral panel dosed in milligrams and a declared moisture figure to build the rest on. Fed to a steady older dog who has always done well on cereal, this is a gentle everyday bowl.

Ingredients, as declared: Rice (33%), fish meal (20%), barley, poultry fat, beet pulp, peas, brewers yeast, yucca, glucosamine, MSM, chondroitin, minerals and vitamins.

Rice at 33% opens the list and is the biggest single thing in the bag. It cooks down into a starch that dogs digest easily, and that is part of why it gets chosen for older stomachs. It is still starch, though, and it takes up room that meat is not taking.

The protein anchor is fish meal at 20%. A meal has no water left in it, so 20% here counts for a good deal more than 20% of a fresh ingredient would. It brings amino acids, marine fats and minerals with it, and a smell that most dogs find hard to walk past. Which fish is not something the label says, and that is normal for the ingredient, though it does leave the species open.

Barley sits behind the rice, carrying fibre along with selenium and copper as well as its starch. It also carries gluten, so it is worth knowing about if you are keeping gluten out of the bowl.

The added fat here is poultry fat, and much of a dry food's flavour comes from its fat. Poultry as a word takes in chicken, duck, goose and turkey. The label picks none of them out. If you are keeping your dog off one particular bird, this label cannot tell you whether it is in there.

Near the end of the list come glucosamine, MSM and chondroitin. That is the right instinct in a food for older dogs. With no doses printed there is no way to judge how much is going in, so count them as a bonus on a food you are already choosing.

Beet pulp is the fibre entry. Peas bring a little plant protein along with fibre of their own, and brewer's yeast adds B vitamins with a savoury note. Yucca is there to make the other end of the process easier to live with. Calcium converts to 0.98% of dry matter. The minerals are printed with their doses: zinc at 50 mg, iron at 50 mg, manganese at 35 mg, copper at 15 mg, iodine at 1 mg and selenium at 0.3 mg per kilo. Biotin is there at 150 mcg.

£3.53 a kilo, sold in 3kg, 7.5kg, 10kg, 15kg and 20kg bags, the two largest supplied as pairs of smaller ones.

As a guide, a 15kg dog in moderate condition would eat about 245 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That works out at £0.87 a day. A dog being fed to slim should sit under that, so treat the label's table as the top end and settle the rest on the waistline.