Natural & Delicious N&D Prime Adult Wet: Wild Boar & Apple review

Our scale puts both of these in the Outstanding band. The typical adult wet food finishes a step below them, in our Excellent band. Wet scores strongly with us, so clearing it comfortably marks out a well-made recipe and not a bare pass. What lifts these two above the middle of it is the honesty of the list. The headline meat is named, cut and given a percentage, the analysis stays genuinely meat-heavy once the water is taken out, and every line of the additive panel prints a figure. The wild boar is the leaner of the two on analysis, while the lamb is the one that reads a shade stronger on our scale.

Ingredients, as declared: Wild boar shoulder (45%), wild boar shank, herring, sweet potato, boiled chicken eggs, apple (4%), fish oil, animal fat, fructo-oligosaccharides, chondroitin sulphate, glucosamine, vitamins, minerals.

One label opens on lamb leg at 50%, the other on wild boar shoulder at 45% with boar shank immediately behind it. Cuts named this precisely are rare on a wet label, and they tell you the meat is muscle rather than a blend described from a distance.

Herring is the second entry in both packs. It brings its own protein and the oils that come with an oily fish, and the fish oil further down doubles up on those. Boiled chicken eggs follow, a dense and easily digested protein which also explains why chicken shows on the allergen reading of two recipes that never name it.

Starch is thin on the ground. Sweet potato is the only carrier. Once the moisture is stripped out the carbohydrate lands at 13.2% of dry matter in the lamb and 21.6% in the wild boar, against 15.8% for the wet adult norm. Blueberry and apple, each printed at 4%, are the small decorative touch, and the fructo-oligosaccharides are there to feed gut bacteria.

Animal fat is the one loose entry on either list. It arrives without a species attached, which is ordinary practice and no reflection on quality, but it does mean these recipes cannot fairly be described as kept to a single animal.

The additive panel is long and fully dosed. It runs from vitamin A at 4000IU and vitamin D3 at 400IU through vitamin E at 130mg and choline chloride at 400mg to taurine at 500mg and L-carnitine at 50mg. Chelated trace minerals go in, the form that tends to be taken up more readily. DL-methionine at 1000mg tops up a sulphur amino acid that meat diets can run a little short on.

The wild boar recipe, with apple printed at 4% and shoulder and shank from the same animal at the front. At 48.0% of dry matter this is the higher protein of the pair, with fat lower at 20.0% and energy declared at 110 kcal per 100g.

Both recipes are sold in a 285 g pack. A per kilo figure for these packs is not something we hold at the moment.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition would get through about 722 grams a day of the lamb recipe or 767 grams of the wild boar. That takes roughly 840 kcal a day as the maintenance target (110 × bodyweight^0.75). Both labels declare their calories, so those weights rest on the maker's own energy figures rather than on an estimate of ours.