Hill's Science Plan Mature Adult 7+ Small & Mini review

Our scoring reads this as Average while the typical adult dry food reads Good, so there is a real gap to account for. It comes down to composition. Cereal and rice fill the first four places, named poultry stops at 11%, and estimated carbohydrate reaches 58.1% of dry matter against the 46.2% typical of adult dry food. Protein and processing and nutritional balance both read Poor, while transparency reads Good. That reads the label, not the food. This one is made to a tight and consistent specification, and a great many small seniors eat it happily.

Ingredients, as declared: Wheat, broken rice, brown rice, maize, chicken and turkey meal (chicken 7%; total poultry 11%), digest, barley, oats, animal fat, dried beet pulp, flaxseed, vegetable oil, minerals, oat bran, fructo-oligosaccharides, dried tomato pomace, dried citrus pulp, spinach powder. ActivBiome+ Multi Benefit prebiotic blend (0.6%): Oat bran, fructo-oligosaccharides.

The opening run of wheat, broken rice, brown rice and maize tells you where the substance of this kibble comes from. Broken rice is rice fractured during milling, no different nutritionally from the whole grain, while brown rice keeps its bran and brings a little more fibre along with it. Barley and oats follow further down. That is a great deal of cereal in one recipe, though every bit of it is cooked to the point where a dog digests it easily.

Meat appears once, as a chicken and turkey meal: 7% chicken, 11% total poultry. Drying comes before mixing, and that concentrates the protein. An equal percentage of fresh meat would deliver less, and protein here lands at 18.8% of dry matter. Even so, the weight of this recipe is on the plant side.

Animal fat is the principal fat and it names no animal, with vegetable oil doing the same thing on the plant side. Digest, the palatant sprayed on to finished kibble, is likewise unspecific. All three are ordinary industry practice and none of them is a quality problem in itself, though between them they mean the label cannot account for every animal in the bag.

Dried beet pulp and oat bran handle the fibre, with the ActivBiome+ blend at 0.6% pairing oat bran with fructo-oligosaccharides to feed the gut's resident bacteria. At 2.6% of dry matter, crude fibre stays modest.

Dried citrus pulp, dried tomato pomace and spinach powder bring up the rear, antioxidant sources with no nutritional weight to them. Flaxseed carries plant omega 3. The trace minerals are dosed per kilo, with zinc at 139 mg, iron at 79.4 mg, manganese at 8.2 mg, copper at 7.8 mg, iodine at 2.0 mg and selenium at 0.2 mg. Calcium is 0.78% of dry matter.

Sold in 1.5kg, 3kg and 6kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg dog in moderate condition would eat about 229 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). This is a small breed recipe, so nearly every dog eating it will be well under that weight and getting through correspondingly less. The label's own table is the sensible place to begin, with the waistline settling it from there.