Happy Dog Vet Diet: Intestinal Low Fat review

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken meat* (21 %), rice flour (20 %), maize flour, oatmeal, fish meal, rice protein* (6 %), maize, carrots*, hydrolysed liver, poultry fat (1 %), sunflower oil, sodium chloride, potassium chloride, canola oil, chicory powder (0.15 % = 0.1 % inulin), yucca schidigera*, psyllium husks, yeasts* (extract, 0.05 % = 0.008 % mannan oligosaccharides), *) 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.

The low fat version keeps chicken meat at the front, 21% here, and cuts the added poultry fat to 1%, which brings declared fat down to 6.9% and 7.5% of dry matter. Maize flour and oatmeal take up more of the base, fish meal stands in for salmon meal, and the herb tail is gone altogether.

Protein is unchanged at 28.3% of dry matter, the carbohydrate estimate rises to 54.9% and energy settles at 326.8 kcal per 100g, with calcium at 1.52%. Chicory powder and yeast extract carry the same printed inulin and mannan oligosaccharide figures as the standard Intestinal. A fat level this low is the reason the food exists, not a weakness in it, and whether your dog needs fat restricted that far is the vet's determination.

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.