Hill's Prescription Diet i/d Puppy Food — canned (with Chicken) review

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives (chicken 7%), cereals, eggs and egg derivatives, minerals, derivatives of vegetable origin, oils and fats, seeds, fruit.

The list here is unusually short and stays in category language the whole way down. Meat and animal derivatives open it with chicken written in at 7%, then cereals, then eggs and egg derivatives, followed by minerals, derivatives of vegetable origin, oils and fats, seeds and fruit. There is no second list of named ingredients of the sort Hill's prints on the dry i/d foods. Chicken and egg are the only animal sources on the tin you can put a species to.

The pack will tell you no more than that. Pinning down what a young dog reacts to takes more than this label. Chicken and egg are declared outright. On the animal side, everything else is folded into the derivatives entry, and getting behind it means asking Hill's.

Protein converts to 30.1% of dry matter and fat to 20.7%, the carbohydrate estimate to 40.4%, and energy reads 108 kcal per 100g. A growth food carries more protein and more fat than an adult one, and a therapeutic version of it is put together to its maker's own targets. Read these as description of the tin rather than as marks for or against it.

A skeleton still forming makes minerals matter more. Calcium on this label reads 1.05% with the water out, and crude ash, the mineral fraction as a whole, sits at 7.0%. The added trace elements are printed individually: iron at 16.9mg, iodine at 0.5mg, copper at 2.8mg, manganese at 3.7mg and zinc at 43.5mg.

The feeding information we hold carries only two points, 200 grams a day at 1kg of body weight and 1800 grams at 20kg. That leaves a lot of room in between for a puppy growing through it. That gap is exactly the sort of thing your vet fills, and the amount they give you is the one to feed.

The tin listed is a single 200g size.