Lakes Collection Lakes Pioneer Sensitive Small Breed: Chicken with Rice review

Our reading of this label is Good, which is the same place everyday adult dry food finishes. It gets there honestly enough. Just under a third of the bag is named chicken in its dried form, rice and the other grains take most of the remainder, and the small print stops after a single plant extract. Transparency comes out Outstanding, with the other three pillars reading Average. What a band cannot capture is the fit, and a plain recipe with a small kibble and a modest fat figure is a combination a great many little dogs settle on happily.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken 29% (Including Dried Chicken 26% & Chicken Fat 3%), Rice (29%), Barley, Oats, Beet Pulp (2%), Brewer's Yeast, Minerals, Yucca Extract (190 mg/kg). Yucca Extract from natural sources, this plant extract is thought to help reduce stool odour. No Added Artificial Colours & Preservatives Naturally preserved using rosemary extract. Formulated without wheat gluten.

Chicken at 29% is declared in two parts, 26% dried chicken and 3% chicken fat. Dried chicken is the concentrated form with its water already removed, so nearly all of that share survives into the finished kibble as protein, converting to 26.1% of dry matter. That is a sensible figure for a small adult rather than a high one.

Rice matches the chicken exactly at 29%, with barley and oats behind it. All three are old and well understood. Cooked, most dogs digest them without trouble, and oats carry dietary fibre plus a spread of micronutrients. No wheat appears on the list, and the label adds that the recipe was formulated without wheat gluten.

The fibre that firms things up is beet pulp at 2%. Very often that is exactly why an owner of a small dog goes looking for a sensitive recipe. Brewer's yeast sits alongside, and few natural ingredients carry the B vitamins better, with a complete set of amino acids of its own.

Yucca extract at 190 mg/kg is the one flourish on the list, included for stool odour, with rosemary extract doing the preserving. Added artificial colours and preservatives are ruled out on the label.

There is no joint set here, no botanical tail and no vitamin figures printed with the minerals, so what appears on the ingredients list really is all there is. On a recipe sold for its plainness that reads as consistency rather than a gap, and the ash declaration of 6.0% points to a modest mineral load behind it.

£7.97 a kilo, sold in a 1.5kg bag.

Taking a day at a time, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat about 243 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes to £1.93 a day. Most dogs on this particular bag are a great deal lighter than 15kg. The label asks 90 to 115 grams for a dog between 5kg and 7kg, so the real daily figure for a little dog will be much lower.