Honey's Out of Season Working Dog Food: Wild Venison review

The typical raw food sits in our Outstanding band, and four of the twelve flavours here sit alongside it: the two blends, the wild pheasant and the wild rabbit. Seven of the others land in our Good band, with the wild game a step up from them in Excellent. All twelve share one construction, so most owners will choose best by animal and by richness, and the bands are only worth weighing when two flavours would suit your dog equally well.

Ingredients, as declared: Minced wild venison including finely minced bone and heart (67%). Minced carrot, cabbage, cauliflower, parsnip and other seasonal vegetables (33%).

Most flavours are built to the same two-line recipe. One animal is minced whole at 67% with its bone and usually its heart, then minced carrot, cabbage, cauliflower, parsnip and other seasonal vegetables at 33%. The wild rabbit borrows some lamb breast alongside its rabbit, and the two blend flavours split their meat between two animals, but the meat-and-vegetable arithmetic barely moves across the range.

Mincing the whole animal is the design rather than a shortcut. Ground bone supplies the calcium a boneless mince would lack, and heart is hard-working muscle that carries nutrition a fillet does not. That matters more than usual here, because Honey's adds no supplements of any kind and says plainly that healthy dogs should get all their nutrition from their food. There is no vitamin premix waiting at the end of the list; the carcass and the vegetables are the whole argument.

A vegetable share of a third is generous by raw standards, and the word seasonal is meant literally. The exact mix in the pack shifts through the year around the named carrot, cabbage, cauliflower and parsnip. Even so, carbohydrate stays close to nowhere, converting to between nothing and 13.6% of dry matter depending on the flavour.

The animal chooses the analysis, and the swing is wider than most ranges manage. The whole wild pheasant is nearly all lean protein, converting to 74.5% of dry matter with fat at just 9.7%. The turkey and lamb are rich cold-weather fuel, with fat at 49.4% and 48.3% of dry matter respectively. Energy runs from 89 kcal per 100g in the wild venison to 205 in the turkey, so treat the flavours as genuinely different foods: match richness to workload, and check portions every time you change.

Minced wild venison with bone and heart at 67%. The lightest flavour of the twelve at 89 kcal per 100g and a true novel protein, with portions the largest in the range to match.

Per kilo, prices run from £6.46 for the free range chicken up to £14.44 for the wild rabbit, with the farmed meats at the lower end and the wild meats at the top. Every flavour comes in 250g and 500g packs.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £2.79 and £10.64 a day depending on flavour. That figure assumes roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate).