Purizon Adult Pouches: Game & Rabbit review

All four pouches share our Outstanding band, separated by the smallest of margins. Which animals suit your dog is the question to answer, because no recipe here is stronger than the others. Wet food does well on our scoring, and the typical adult recipe lands a band lower in our Excellent band. What marks these pouches out is the sheer weight of animal content behind them. Every one of the four reads Outstanding for nutritional balance, and protein converts to between 58.3% and 60.9% of dry matter once the water is taken out.

Ingredients, as declared: 45% Chicken Fillet, 28.8% Broth, 10% Chicken Liver and Fat, 5% Game, 5% Rabbit, 3% Pumpkin, 2% Cranberry, 1% Minerals, 0.2% Salmon Oil

The first two lines do most of the work. Chicken fillet at 45% opens every label, and the broth behind it is declared at 28.8%. Plenty of wet labels fold that water in without naming it. Writing it out is the straighter way.

After that comes the organ meat, and it is where the four part company. One takes turkey liver and gizzards, two more take chicken liver and fat, and lung and heart from black angus or lamb sit alongside. Liver is rich in B vitamins and easy to digest, and little else in a bowl is as nutrient dense. Here it arrives with a printed amount beside it.

Plant matter is a garnish. Sweet potato, pumpkin or potato at 3% and cranberry or pears at 2% is the whole of it. That is why the estimated carbohydrate runs between 5.9% and 8.3% of dry matter, where the typical adult wet food sits at 15.8%. Those carbohydrate readings are worked out by taking everything else away from the total rather than measured, so read them as a direction of travel.

Salmon oil closes each list at 0.2%, and minerals at 1% cover the rest. At that level the marine omega 3 is a garnish. The added vitamin and mineral panel prints vitamin E at 20 IU, zinc at 25mg, manganese at 1.4mg, iodine at 0.75mg and copper at 1.5mg. It appears on only two of the four labels. Read it as the shape of the range, and not as a promise on every pouch.

One thing to flag on the Salmon pouch. The ingredient list printed for it is word for word the Black Angus and Turkey list, chicken fillet, turkey liver and gizzards, black angus lung and heart and all. Its analysis is its own, so it is plainly a different recipe in the pouch, but the list as printed cannot be the right one for a salmon dinner. If salmon is the reason you are buying it, the pouch in your hand is the thing to read.

The only pouch with rabbit, at 5% alongside 5% game, on chicken liver and fat at 10% with pumpkin carrying the 3% of plant matter. Rabbit is uncommon in dog food, and plenty of dogs will not have met it before. This is also the fattiest of the four at 25.0% of dry matter.

Sold in one size, a 300g pouch.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between 750 and 800 grams a day depending on the recipe. Take about 840 kcal a day as the basis (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes to a shade more than two and a half pouches.