Happy Dog Vet Diet: Recovery review

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and offal of chicken (50 %) and turkey (15%), sweet potato (3 %), whole egg powder (2 %), potato protein, minerals, salmon oil (0.5 %), cellulose, chicory root (source for FOS) (0.2%), milk thistle seeds (0.05 %)

Every tin opens on meat and offal rather than a named cut. Chicken runs through all five of them, pork joins it in three, and turkey appears only in the Recovery. Three of the tins print the meat percentages in brackets and two leave them out, so how much animal content you are buying is visible on some of the range and not on the rest.

Salmon oil is in all five. Hold on to that if you are keeping a dog off fish, because it is fish derived even in tins that list no fish as a meat. Chicory root appears throughout as the FOS source, and cellulose does the fibre work in three of them.

Minerals arrive on the ingredient lists as a single word, with the actual figures held back for the additive panel. Vitamins D3 and E appear in every tin there, and each trace element carries its own dose. DL-methionine, an acidifying amino acid, is added to three of the five. The dose differs so sharply between them that it is worth reading on the variety in front of you.

Four of the five declare their moisture. No tin prints a calorie figure, so those are calculated and the dry matter columns are worked from what the tin gives. Because these are wet foods, the daily amounts on the labels look large next to a kibble chart. That is the water talking, not a difference in feeding.

None of that decides which tin your dog should be eating. The variety, the amount and how long a dog stays on it are all set by the vet treating the condition the tin is named for.

Recovery is the concentrated one and the only tin in the smaller size. Chicken is at 50% and turkey at 15% within the meat and offal, sweet potato at 3%, whole egg powder at 2%, salmon oil at 0.5% and milk thistle seeds at 0.05%. Protein converts to 51.2% of dry matter and fat to 29.6%, leaving the carbohydrate estimate at 10.8% and energy at 117.2 kcal per 100g.

The additive panel is the fullest in the range, with the B vitamins present throughout, choline chloride at 600 mg per kilo, L-carnitine at 1000 mg and taurine at 750 mg. Calcium reads 1.12% of dry matter. Packing that much into a small tin is the whole idea of a convalescence food, since a dog eating poorly still has to take in what it needs. Your vet decides when a dog moves off it.

Four of the tins come in 400g, sold singly or in sixes, and three of those four are also offered as a case of 48. The Recovery is a smaller 200g tin, sold singly or in sixes. Among the 400g tins the figure per kilo runs from £5.72 for Intestinal, Renal and Struvit up to £12.08 for Adipositas. Feeding a 15kg dog on tins alone, on an energy based estimate, that comes to somewhere between about £3.55 and £17.53 a day depending on the variety. These tins are often fed alongside a kibble on the vet's instruction.