Hill's Science Plan Mature Adult 7+ review

Older dogs are the hardest group for a nutrition score to serve, because senior recipes are usually built to be gentler and lighter and neither of those is a quality a scoring system can reward. Some of the reading here is that.

The rest of it is the label. Five entries, one of them an ingredient you could actually point to, and nutritional balance reading Poor about the same page. That is what puts this tin in our Average band while the typical adult wet food holds a comfortable place in Excellent.

It is a reading about disclosure rather than about danger. Hill's builds to a tight nutritional specification, tests what it makes, and generations of older dogs have kept their weight and their coats on tins exactly like this one. This is background for those owners, not a prompt to change anything.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives (chicken 12%), cereals, minerals, derivatives of vegetable origin, oils and fats.

The composition is five lines long: meat and animal derivatives with chicken named at 12%, then cereals, minerals, derivatives of vegetable origin and oils and fats. Four of those five are legal category terms, each covering a wide field of possible materials and each free to change between batches without the pack changing with it. The 12% of chicken is the fixed point, and as declared shares on a category led wet tin go it is a real one.

Meat and animal derivatives sounds worse than it is, and the phrase repays a precise definition. It covers the flesh and by-products of warm blooded land animals, which takes in organ meats that are genuinely nutritious as well as parts nobody would choose first. The term itself tells you nothing either way, and that ambiguity is the point: a good recipe and a plain one can hide behind exactly the same words.

The analysis is moderate throughout. Protein converts to 22.6% of dry matter and fat to 13.5%, a gentle combination that suits an older digestion and is easy on a dog doing less than it used to. Energy comes in at 90 kcal per 100g, a little under the 97 kcal typical for adult wet food, so portions are on the generous side.

Estimated carbohydrate is the number that stands out, at 55.6% of dry matter against 15.8% for the typical adult wet tin. Unnamed cereals are carrying a large share of this recipe, more than most owners picture when they buy wet food, and that is the single biggest reason our reading sits where it does.

Calcium converts to 1.13% of dry matter. A healthy adult dog handles that comfortably. Mention it to your vet, though, if your dog's kidneys have put it on a restricted mineral plan, as senior dogs are the group most likely to be on one.

The added trace minerals are printed with a dose each, iron at 10.0 mg, iodine at 0.3 mg, copper at 1.7 mg, manganese at 2.2 mg and zinc at 25.8 mg per kilo. It is a short panel and a fully declared one, which makes a pleasant contrast with the composition above it.

Sold as a 370 g tin.

There was no checked per-kilo figure on hand as this was written, so a day rate is not given alongside it. On portioning, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat around 939 grams a day, taking about 840 kcal a day as the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75). An older dog with a quieter routine usually needs a little less than that, so let the weighing scales settle the amount.