Natures Menu Country Hunter 80%: Wild Venison with Superfoods review

This one sits in our Outstanding band, the band a typical raw food occupies. It holds the standard of the strongest category we cover without clearing it by a distance. Protein and processing, nutritional balance, transparency and value each read Outstanding. The 80% venison inclusion does most of that work. A carbohydrate estimate of 7.8% of dry matter and a label that names and percentages everything worth naming do the rest.

Ingredients, as declared: Venison 80%, Blueberry 4%, Swede 4%, Carrots 4%, Peas 2%, Spinach 1%, Pea Fibre, Sunflower Oil, Minerals, Yucca, Green Tea

The recipe is built around venison at 80%, and no other animal is on the list. An exclusion trial is not complicated here by fish oil, egg or unnamed fat. That is rarer than it sounds, and it makes this a label you can genuinely lean on.

Venison itself is a fine red meat for dogs. It is easy to digest and rich in protein, and its real advantage here is simply that most dogs have no history with it. Any elimination diet starts with a protein the dog has never eaten, and deer sits about as far from the supermarket meats as British pet food gets.

The remaining fifth is fruit and vegetables rather than starch. Blueberry at 4% brings antioxidants. Swede and carrots at 4% each add gentle fibre and beta carotene, and peas with spinach finish the plant side. Carbohydrate converts to just 7.8% of dry matter as a result, which is where a raw recipe belongs.

Minerals are added and printed per kilo, and the trace elements are itemised. Selenium comes as an inactivated selenised yeast, not a plain salt. Sunflower oil sits in the tail for its vitamin E and its fatty acids, and yucca with green tea closes the list the way it does across the Natures Menu range.

One figure on the analysis stands out. Crude ash converts to 14.1% of dry matter. That is high for a mince with no bone named in its composition, and no calcium figure is printed to explain it. Protein at 43.8% and fat at 31.2% of dry matter are exactly what an 80% venison recipe ought to produce, so the rest of the panel reads true.

£8.30 a kilo, sold as a 500g block.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75), which on this recipe works out at roughly 538 grams a day, or £4.47. The label's own guide puts a 10kg to 25kg dog at 395 to 790 grams a day.