JosiDog Senior/Light review

This one lands in the Average band, a step under the Good band the middle of the adult dry category holds, which makes it an ordinary result rather than a red flag. Two features hold it where it is. Protein reads light once the figures are on a dry matter basis, and the starch share outweighs the meat share. Neither is an accident. A light senior food is designed to strip energy out of the bowl, and this one does it deliberately, with the fat figure to prove the point. Judged as what it is, a lean everyday food for a dog past its running years, it does the job the label promises.

Ingredients, as declared: whole grain maize; barley; dried poultry protein; rice; beet fibre; meat and bone meal; poultry fat; hydrolysed poultry protein; hydrolysed animal protein; minerals

Three cereals open the list, and each brings something slightly different. Whole grain maize leads as the main energy source. Barley follows with a genuinely useful helping of fibre plus selenium and copper, and rice sits fourth as the gentlest of the three on an older digestion. Barley does carry gluten, which is the one thing to know if that is a line you are holding.

The principal meat is dried poultry protein. It goes in already dry, and little of it is lost between the label and the bowl. Meat and bone meal sits behind it, a rendered meal that brings its own calcium and phosphorus, though its origin is left open. Poultry fat is named only to the family. Between them these entries take protein to 22.8% of dry matter, which is workable for a lean adult food but is not a high-protein senior recipe by any reading.

The two hydrolysed entries, poultry protein and animal protein, are there for the nose rather than the numbers. Hydrolysing breaks protein into small savoury fragments, and an older dog with a fading sense of smell is exactly the eater that benefits from that. On a food this lean, palatability is not a luxury.

Beet fibre lifts crude fibre to 3.6% of dry matter, more than the JosiDog recipes built for younger dogs carry, and fibre is what lets a smaller portion still feel like a meal. Fat comes in at 8.7% of dry matter and estimated carbohydrate at 58.3%, against 46.2% for the typical adult dry food. That is the trade a light food makes: take the fat out and the starch share goes up.

Every line of the vitamin and trace mineral panel carries its own figure. Zinc comes as a glycine chelate at 160 mg per kilo, and a dog takes up that form more readily than a plain salt. Iron is at 200 mg, copper at 20 mg and manganese at 16 mg per kilo. Vitamin E at 150 mg holds the fats stable.

£2.00 a kilo, sold as a 900g bag, a five-pack of 900g bags and a 15kg sack.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, the usual maintenance figure of about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75) puts the portion near 246 grams, and the daily spend at £0.49. The maker is more sparing, asking 155 grams at 10kg and 230 grams at 20kg, so a dog of that size sits between the two figures and the waistline decides which one is right.