Husse Digest Giant review

This lands in our Good band, the same band the midpoint of the adult dry category occupies. Protein converts to 26.1% of dry matter and carbohydrate to 47.4%, close to the 46.2% typical. Protein and processing sits at Average, and so does nutritional balance. Transparency and value both read Good. Energy is declared rather than estimated, at 392 kcal in 100 grams against 357 for a typical adult dry food, which is useful when a large dog needs its calories without the volume. A score is a general-nutrition reading, and it makes no attempt to measure how well a plain recipe settles a big dog that has been through several richer ones.

Read the pillars together and you get a food that gets the ordinary things right, saving its ambition for one job: keeping a large, easily upset dog comfortable.

Ingredients, as declared: lamb, rice, rice flour, animal fat, salmon, linseed, yeast, vegetable fibres, hydrolysed animal protein, salmon oil, salt, fructo-oligosaccharides (0.3%), potassium chloride, lecithin, sea algae, glucosamine (500 mg/kg), rosemary.

Lamb leads, with rice and rice flour carrying the starch behind it. It is the classic pairing for a dog that reacts to busier foods, chosen because both parts are easy to digest and neither springs surprises from one bag to the next.

The joint addition is what marks this out as the big-dog version. Glucosamine at 500 mg per kilo is aimed at cartilage in a dog whose knees and hips carry far more weight than a terrier's. The dose is printed.

Moisture is declared at 8.0%, so the dry matter figures here rest on the maker's own number. It is a small piece of transparency, but it is the kind that makes every other figure on the page more solid.

The gut work is done quietly. Fructo-oligosaccharides at 0.3% feed the friendly bacteria, and yeast and vegetable fibres supply the roughage. Clinoptilolite at 10 g per kilo is a sedimentary clay working as a binder. Lecithin and sea algae round the list off.

Salt has a line of its own, added for palatability as it is in a great many dry foods. A healthy dog is rarely troubled by it, though it is reasonable to mention at a check-up if blood pressure or the heart is already on the agenda. Potassium chloride sits beside it as a mineral source.

Lamb leads the recipe without having it to itself. Salmon and salmon oil supply marine omega 3, a real plus for skin and coat and a fact to hold onto if fish is off the list at your house. The animal fat and the hydrolysed protein name no species at all. For a strict elimination trial, those are the lines that get in the way.

The mineral dosing is thorough and printed in full. Zinc is at 108 mg plus 12 mg in a second form, with iron at 201 mg, manganese at 62.5 mg and copper at 7.5 mg per kilo. Vitamin C is added at 300 mg.

£4.55 a kilo. The bag is 12.5kg, and a twin pack puts two of them together.

As a guide, a 15kg adult in moderate condition would take about 214 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), or £0.97 a day. Most dogs on this bag will be a good deal larger than that, and the label asks 250 to 350 grams for a dog between 25kg and 35kg.