Natural Instinct Senior review

This recipe holds our Outstanding band, and it holds it in the toughest company we score. The middle of the raw field sits in that same band, which says a great deal about how strong raw feeding has become and nothing unkind about this particular bowl. Protein and processing, nutritional balance and value all read Outstanding, with transparency Good. That transparency reading comes from a label that names its joint ingredients generously but quantifies neither of them.

Ingredients, as declared: chicken 75%, apple, butternut squash, carrot, chondroitin sulphate, glucosamine hydochloride, kelp, salmon oil, spinach, vitamin c

Chicken at 75% is the whole animal story, and the vegetable side behind it is short and legible: apple, butternut squash, carrot, spinach, kelp and salmon oil. Soluble fibre and the pigments behind vitamin A come from the carrot. Kelp is where the iodine and the trace minerals come from, and the salmon oil covers the omega 3 fats a stiffening older dog is usually given a supplement for. The only supplemented nutrient on the list is vitamin C, declared inline.

The joint pair is the reason this recipe exists. Chondroitin occurs naturally in cartilage and glucosamine in bone and marrow, so any meat based bowl carries traces of both, and the point of naming them here is to lift the amount beyond traces. Clinical results for the pair have been mixed over the years, so the honest reading is that this is a sensible inclusion and not a promise. It also saves an owner buying and measuring a separate supplement.

Calcium converts to 2.89% of dry matter with ash at 10.3%, which is ground bone in the mince doing the mineral work, not an added carbonate. That is a normal reading for a bone in raw recipe and it means the calcium is arriving in the form and the company a dog digests it best in.

The analysis reads like proper raw food, not a lightened senior formula. Protein at 45.7% of dry matter, fat at 37.9%, carbohydrate estimated at 4.5% and energy at 155 kcal per 100g put it right on the raw category's usual mark for energy. An older dog that has slowed down needs a smaller portion rather than a weaker food, and this label lets you make that adjustment without giving anything up.

£4.59 a kilo, sold as a 1kg pack or as two 500g packs.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, needing about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), that works out at roughly 542 grams a day, or £2.49. An older dog carrying less muscle and doing less walking will usually need somewhat under that, so treat it as the top of the range.