Lovejoys Original Dry Adult: Duck & Rice review

Three of these four finish in our Good band, and most adult dry food finishes there as well, with the fish recipe one band lower in Average. The reason is naming rather than anything harmful. Meat meal is a concentrated and genuinely useful ingredient, and when a label calls it duck meat meal, lamb meat meal or turkey meat meal you know precisely what you are getting. When it is called fish meal you do not, and that is what leaves the fish recipe a band behind its three siblings. Rice leading every list also caps how far any of them can climb. For a dog with an ordinary appetite and no particular sensitivities, all four feed perfectly well.

Ingredients, as declared: Rice (48.0%), Duck Meat Meal (26.0%), Whole Oats, Whole Linseed (3.0%), Duck Fat, Poultry Digest, Sugar Beet Pellets, Alfalfa Pellets, Seaweed Meal (0.5%), Fructo-oligosaccharides (Prebiotic FOS), Extract of Yucca Schidigera (200 mg/kg)

In all four recipes rice is the first ingredient, 41% of the lamb rising to 49% of the turkey, and it is a sound choice for the job. For most dogs cooked rice is about as easy as carbohydrate gets. Recipes aimed at delicate stomachs use it constantly for that reason. Whole oats back it up in the duck and turkey, whole barley in the fish and lamb. Both carry fibre and a useful spread of micronutrients. Carbohydrate is estimated at between 51.0% and 53.8% of dry matter across the range, above the 46.2% typical of adult dry food.

The animal side is meat meal in every recipe, at 26% in the duck, fish and turkey and 28% in the lamb. Meat meal has a worse reputation than it deserves. The material has already been rendered and dried before it goes in. A given percentage of meal therefore carries considerably more finished animal content than an equal percentage of fresh meat. Protein converts to between 22.8% and 26.1% of dry matter across the four, a fair result for a rice-led food.

Naming is where the recipes differ most. Duck meat meal, lamb meat meal and turkey meat meal each say which animal they came from. That is exactly what a label should tell you. The fish recipe's fish meal does not, so it could be any species or a mixture of several. The digest entries follow the same pattern. Lamb and turkey name theirs, while the duck and the fish use poultry digest, and that poultry could be goose, duck, turkey or chicken. Digest is a small entry sprayed on for palatability, but it is the one that will trip you up if you are ruling a particular bird out.

Every recipe takes its omega 3 from whole linseed at 2.5% to 3%. The fish recipe adds salmon oil at 2% and sunflower oil on top. Linseed's omega 3 comes in its plant form. A dog is slower to turn that into the active forms than it is with fish oil, so allow a coat some weeks to answer. Seaweed meal at 0.5% brings iodine and trace minerals, and alfalfa pellets add plant fibre and protein. Sugar beet pellets appear in the duck, lamb and turkey, the fibrous material that remains after the sugar comes out.

The support cast is declared properly. The large intestine gets its prebiotic from fructo-oligosaccharides. Yucca schidigera at 200 mg/kg has a long history in dog food as a way of taking the edge off stool odour. The mineral panel is printed item by item. Zinc at 100 mg, iron at 60 mg, manganese at 50 mg, copper at 7.50 mg, iodine at 1.50 mg and selenium at 0.10 mg per kilo, alongside vitamin E at 125 mg. These arrive as sulphates, not chelates: the commoner form, and the less readily absorbed of the two. The doses therefore matter more than they would on a chelated label.

Rice at 48% with duck meat meal at 26% and duck fat behind it, on whole oats rather than barley. Duck makes a change for a dog tired of the usual birds, and it is one of the easier meats to digest. The digest here is listed as poultry, not duck, so the recipe is not quite a single-bird one.

Per kilo, the turkey is £4.55, the lamb £4.57, the fish £5.03 and the duck £5.24. Every recipe comes in a 2kg bag and a 12kg bag.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 251 grams a day of the duck, fish or lamb. The turkey takes about 255 grams. That works from about 840 kcal a day, using 110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate. That puts the day rate between £1.15 and £1.31 depending on the recipe.