Happy Dog Vet Diet: Renal review

Ingredients, as declared: Maize, rice flour, potato flakes, poultry fat, meat meal (8 %), salmon meal (4 %), dried whole egg (2 %), carrots*, hydrolysed liver, sunflower oil, potassium chloride, canola oil, calcium carbonate, yeasts*, sodium chloride, seaweed*, linseed (0.15 %), mussel meat* (0.04 %), milk thistle, yeasts* (extract), artichoke, dandelion (0.015 %), ginger, birch leaves (0.015 %), stinging nettle, camomile, coriander, rosemary, sage, liquorice root, thyme (total dried products from the processing of herbs: 0.16%); * 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.

Renal reverses the usual order. Maize leads with rice flour and potato flakes behind it, and the meat arrives well down the list as meat meal at 8% and salmon meal at 4%, with dried whole egg at 2%. Meat meal leaves the species unnamed, which is worth flagging if your dog avoids a particular animal as well.

Protein is held to 17.4% of dry matter while fat runs to precisely the same figure, 17.4%. That is an unusual pairing, and it reflects the restriction the diet is built on, not a slip in the recipe. Energy is the highest in the line at 381 kcal per 100g, the carbohydrate estimate reads 58.7%, and calcium is the lowest of the seven at 0.43% of dry matter. Restricting protein and minerals together is what a diet of this type is for, and how far your dog needs it restricted is a clinical judgement.

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.