Happy Dog Vet Diet: Hepatic review

Ingredients, as declared: Rice flour, rice protein* (15 %), chicken meat (10 %), maize flour, poultry fat, sunflower oil, carrots*, hydrolysed liver, cellulose, canola oil, linseed, potassium chloride, milk thistle seeds* (0.2 %), sodium chloride, seaweed*, yeasts* (extract), chicory root*; *) dried.

Six of the seven follow one house pattern. A cereal or potato base sits at the front, poultry fat is the added fat, dried carrots, potassium chloride and sodium chloride cover the mineral side, and a fine tail of botanicals closes it. Urinary Low Purine sits apart from that pattern entirely, which the notes on that variety cover.

Hydrolysed liver is the ingredient every one of the seven shares. It is liver broken down into a coating rather than fed as an organ meat, and its job is keeping a therapeutic kibble worth eating for a dog whose appetite has gone quiet. On diets a dog has to stay on for months, that is not a small consideration.

Four of them carry the same long herb list, milk thistle, artichoke, dandelion, ginger, birch leaves, stinging nettle, camomile, coriander, rosemary, sage, liquorice root and thyme, declared together as 0.16% of dried herb products. Individual entries within it are printed as low as 0.008%. These are seasoning quantities.

Species naming varies a lot from one variety to the next. Some print chicken or salmon by name, others use poultry protein or meat meal, which leaves the animal open. If your dog is avoiding a particular bird or a particular red meat, the variety you are handed matters far more than the range as a whole does.

None of the seven declares its moisture, and the bags print no calorie figure, so the dry matter columns and the energy numbers here are both estimates. The added vitamin and trace element panels, by contrast, are itemised variety by variety. Vitamins A, D3, E and the B group sit beside iron, copper, zinc, manganese, iodine and selenium, and several varieties add L-carnitine or taurine on top.

Nothing here tells you which of the seven your dog needs. That is named at the consultation, and the vet who named the condition is the one who names the food.

Hepatic splits its protein between a plant and a named bird. Rice flour opens, rice protein follows at 15% and chicken meat at 10%, so a good part of the amino acid supply arrives from rice. Protein converts to 21.2% of dry matter, fat to 15.2%, the carbohydrate estimate to 56.6%, and energy is put at 369.2 kcal per 100g.

The additive panel is where this one differs most. Copper is dosed at 3 mg per kilo and manganese at the same figure, both restrained beside the rest of the line, while taurine is added at 2000 mg and L-carnitine at 900 mg. Milk thistle seeds are declared at 0.2% and calcium works out at 0.54% of dry matter. Holding copper low is a recognised feature of diets built for the liver, and how relevant that is to your dog is your vet's reading rather than ours.

The line comes in 1kg, 4kg, 12kg and 12.5kg bags depending on the variety, and four of them are also sold as multipacks. Per kilo the varieties run from £5.23 to £8.07. On an energy based estimate for a 15kg dog, that lands somewhere between about £1.15 and £2.07 a day across the range, with the vet's dosing instruction coming first.