Hill's Prescription Diet k/d + Mobility Stew for Dogs review

Ingredients, as declared: with Chicken & added Vegetables: Chicken (5%), rice flour, various sugars, pork liver, rice starch, flaxseed, fish oil, digest, soybean oil, minerals, rice, dried carrots, cellulose, dried eggs, animal fat, dried peas, vitamins, oat bran, fructo-oligosachcarides and trace elements. Total vegetables (1.2%).

This label is written in named ingredients instead of category headings, so you can read straight down it and see what is actually in the tin. Chicken opens at 5%, rice flour comes next, then various sugars and pork liver, with rice starch, flaxseed and fish oil behind them. Total vegetables are printed at 1.2%, and dried carrots and dried peas are the ones you can actually see named.

Digest sits in the middle of the list. It is a processed palatant, worked into the food to keep a dog returning to a bowl it might otherwise walk away from. Appetite is part of the picture whenever a diet like this is prescribed.

Chicken, pork liver, dried eggs and fish oil put four animal sources into the recipe, while animal fat is the single entry that declines to say which animal it came from. Soybean oil appears too, and a refined oil behaves differently from soya meal for a dog that reacts to soya, since the protein is not carried across.

The printed analysis stops short of a full panel. Protein is declared at 3.5%, fat at 5.5% and crude fibre at 0.9%, but no moisture figure is given, so there is no honest way to put those on a dry matter basis. Energy is an estimate at 93 kcal per 100g rather than a declared value, and no ash figure is printed either.

Oat bran and fructo-oligosaccharides turn up as loose ingredients towards the end of the list, without the ActivBiome+ name the tins use. Cellulose sits alongside them as plain indigestible fibre. Vitamins and trace elements are bare headings with no doses printed against them. The label says they are in there and stops short of how much.

Portions run from 212 grams a day at 4kg through 529 grams at 20kg to 978 grams at 40kg. A stew is often reached for when a dog has stopped clearing its bowl, and whether that swap is the right move here is a conversation for the practice that made the diagnosis.

It comes in a 354 g can. Fed to the label's guide, a 15kg dog would need around 900 grams a day, so between two and three cans.