Happy Dog Sensible Pure: Lamb Pure (New Zealand) review

Four recipes reach our Outstanding band, six more sit in Excellent and the Sea Fish holds Good. What separates them is what each label chooses to print, and hardly the animal at all. The labels that declare more of themselves read higher on transparency, even though the construction underneath is the same in every pack. The middle of the wet adult shelf sits in our Excellent band too, so a Good reading in this company is still a fine tin and no straggler.

The analysis itself is exceptional for a wet food. Protein converts to between 47.3% and 58.4% of dry matter and fat to between 23.8% and 36.4%, with carbohydrate barely registering because there is nothing in the recipe to supply it. On the labels that skip moisture, the estimated carbohydrate figure is really the slack in that estimate, not anything added to the pack. Hold that in mind when you compare one recipe against another.

Ingredients, as declared: Lamb Meat and Lamb by-products (67% - lamb lung, lamb meat, lamb liver, lamb heart), minerals ) (Recipe contains 32.8% drinking water)

The construction never changes. One animal, its muscle meat and its organs, and added minerals. Hearts, livers, lungs, stomachs, tripe and larynx are named individually on the labels that use them, which is unusually candid: most makers fold organ meat into a category term and leave you guessing. Few foods carry as much nutrition as liver, and on these labels you can see which animal supplied it.

Five labels put a figure on their animal share: 70% for the Beef, Game and Horse, 67% for the Lamb and 60% for the Sea Fish. Three of those also declare their drinking water, at 29.8% or 32.8%. The other six describe their contents in words without weighing them, which is the single biggest difference between the recipes that scored well here and the ones that did not.

With no grain, no vegetable and no gum in the recipe, everything in the analysis comes from the animal. That is why protein sits so high and why fat follows it, running from a lean 23.8% of dry matter on the Horse to 36.4% on the Lamb. Dogs that put on weight easily suit the leaner recipes, and the labels print enough for you to choose.

The declared additive panels vary more than the food does. Some labels list only vitamin D3 and vitamin E, most add vitamin A and vitamin B1, and only the Game prints zinc, manganese and iodine alongside them. Minerals appear in the ingredient list on every recipe, so the difference is in what gets declared rather than necessarily in what goes in.

Calcium is printed on eight of the labels and the spread is wide, running from 0.75% of dry matter on the Buffalo to 3.64% on the Lamb. For a healthy adult dog on a mixed feeding routine, that variation is not something to lose sleep over. If calcium is being managed for a reason, it is a good argument for picking one recipe and staying with it.

Lamb lung, meat, liver and heart at 67%, with 32.8% drinking water declared. It is the richest recipe here, fat converting to 36.4% of dry matter, and nutritional balance reads Outstanding on our pillars. Calcium is the highest declared in the range at 3.64% of dry matter, worth knowing if that is something you are watching.

£11.22 a kilo on the Beef, Duck, Game, Lamb and Turkey recipes and £7.91 on the Goat. The other five had no per-kilo figure when we checked. Sold in 400g and 800g sizes, with the Goat, Kangaroo and Ostrich in 400g only.

The basis is a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition on about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). On the recipes we have a figure for, feeding comes to between £5.79 and £9.17 a day. Across the whole range that corresponds to roughly 732 to 1004 grams a day. The label's own guide for a dog of 10 to 25 kg runs from 500 to 1000 grams.