Laughing Dog Naturally Complete Dog Food: Salmon review

Our scoring puts the chicken and the lamb in the Excellent band with the salmon in the Good band, which is where most adult dry food settles. The reasons are structural rather than showy. A large share of one named animal leads every recipe, and the meal and fresh portions are printed instead of blurred into a single figure. Carbohydrate converts to between 38.5% and 41.3% of dry matter against a 46.2% norm, and no unnamed fat or derivative turns up to muddy the picture. The chicken and lamb finish level with each other, with the salmon a band behind them. The gap is small enough that the deciding factor should be which animal suits your dog.

Ingredients, as declared: Salmon (42%) (22% Salmon Meal, 20% Freshly Prepared Salmon), Sweet Potato (34%), Beet Pulp, Linseed, Pea (4%), Salmon Oil, Salmon Gravy, Botanicals (0.2% Seaweed, 0.15% MOS, 0.15% FOS, 0.015% Yucca, 0.015% Parsley and 0.005% Citrus Extract), Minerals.

Every recipe splits its meat two ways, a meal share and a freshly prepared share, and printing both is the genuinely useful part. The water is already out of meal before it goes in, so that share survives into the finished kibble intact. Fresh meat shrinks away in the oven. The lamb declares the largest meal share at 25%, with the salmon at 22% and the chicken at 21%.

For starch there is sweet potato and nothing else, 33% in the chicken, 34% in the salmon and 31% in the lamb. It is a whole ingredient, and a better answer to the grain free question than a bag of refined starches would be. Peas and beet pulp fill in behind it, and carbohydrate finishes between 38.5% and 41.3% of dry matter.

Linseed is in all three and declared at 4% in the chicken and the lamb. It brings omega 3 from a plant. The salmon needs it less, since salmon oil is already in the recipe and a dog works with marine omega 3 most directly.

Every entry in the small botanical block carries a figure. MOS and FOS at 0.15% each are the prebiotic pair, yucca at 0.015% is aimed at stool odour, and everything after that, whether turmeric, thyme, parsley or marigold, sits at trace level. That is honest labelling of a small thing, with no large claim made about it.

The mineral panel is itemised, and zinc arrives in two forms: 87.5 mg as the sulphate and 37.5 mg as a chelate. A dog generally absorbs the chelated version more easily. Selenium comes both as sodium selenite and as an organic yeast form, a more considered pairing than most labels bother with. Preservation is by tocopherol extracts from vegetable oils, nothing synthetic.

Salmon at 42%, split as 22% salmon meal and 20% freshly prepared salmon, with salmon oil added on top so the omega 3 comes straight from the sea. Seaweed joins the botanicals at 0.2% and pea is declared at 4%, and this is the only variety in the range built on fish.

£5.00 a kilo across all three varieties, sold in 2kg and 10kg bags.

Day to day, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would eat about 233 grams a day of the chicken or lamb and 235 grams of the salmon. Those 233 and 235 gram figures assume around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes to £1.17 a day on the two land meats and £1.18 on the salmon. The label asks 170 to 295 grams for a dog between 12kg and 25kg, so the two guides agree closely.