Happy Dog Vet Diet: Struvite review

Ingredients, as declared: Rice, poultry protein, potato flakes, barley, poultry fat, carrots*, hydrolysed liver, sunflower oil, maize, dried whole egg, potassium chloride, yeasts*, sodium chloride, canola oil, seaweed*, linseed, chicory root*, milk thistle, yeasts* (extract), mussel meat* (0.02 %), artichoke, dandelion (0.016 %), ginger, birch leaves, stinging nettle (0.016 %), camomile, coriander, rosemary, sage, liquorice root, thyme, (total dried products from the processing of herbs: 0.16 %); *) dried, ) dried, partially hydrolysed

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.

Struvite opens on rice ahead of poultry protein, with barley and potato flakes filling out the base, so the grain content is broader here than in most of the line. Protein converts to 21.7% of dry matter, fat to 10.3%, ash to 6.0% and the carbohydrate estimate to 59.8%, with energy at 343.2 kcal per 100g.

L-carnitine is included at 200 mg per kilo and mussel meat appears as a trace at 0.02%. Calcium reads 0.6% of dry matter. The pack labels its chart as the normal requirement for an adult dog, and it runs from 46 grams a day at 2kg to 740 grams at 80kg. A diet aimed at crystals is usually fed to an amount and a timetable the vet sets.

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.