Hill's Science Plan Perfect Weight Small & Mini Adult Dog Food with Turkey review

Our bands are hard on labels written like this one, and Average is where it comes out. Protein and processing reads Average, held there by an ingredients list that names a single animal at 4%. The rest sits in legal categories that can be filled differently from batch to batch, while nutritional balance and transparency both read Good. Most adult wet food clears our Excellent band, largely because most wet labels say what is in the tray. Set the paperwork aside and the recipe is a coherent piece of work: plenty of fibre, restrained fat and an energy figure held well under the wet food average. Those are sensible choices for a small dog being asked to lose a bit.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives (turkey 4%), derivatives of vegetable origin, vegetables, seeds, vegetable protein extracts, eggs and egg derivatives, oils and fats, minerals, fruit.

Turkey is the named animal at 4%, a small printed share, and the meat and animal derivatives entry it sits inside carries the rest without saying what that is. Turkey itself is lean and easy on a stomach, and it makes a sensible headline for a recipe built to be light.

Derivatives of vegetable origin, vegetables, seeds and fruit make up the plant side, none of them named individually. What they add up to is unusually fibrous for a wet food, with crude fibre converting to 13.8% of dry matter where an ordinary wet recipe sits far below that. Fibre is the honest tool for keeping a dieting dog comfortable between meals, and this recipe uses plenty of it.

Vegetable protein extracts appear here as they do in the chicken version. They push protein up to 27.9% of dry matter, a respectable level for a light food, though some of that total is plant protein of unstated origin rather than protein from meat.

The analysis is fully declared, with moisture at 76.0%, fat converting to 12.5% of dry matter and carbohydrate estimated at 40.0%. Calcium sits at 0.71% of dry matter. Every trace mineral is printed dose by dose, iron at 12.6mg per kilo and zinc at 33.6mg among them, with copper, manganese and iodine following.

Sold in a 200 g tray.

Working from the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs around 840 kcal a day, which this recipe would cover at roughly 1018 grams. A dog being slimmed down eats below a maintenance figure, so treat that as a ceiling and not a target, and feed to the amount your vet has set.