Royal Canin Cavalier King Charles Puppy review

This lands in our Average band. The middle of the puppy dry shelf sits a rung higher. Transparency reads Poor while nutritional balance comes back Good, with protein and processing Average. That comes down to a list naming almost none of its animal ingredients and an analysis that stops after four lines.

Set against that, the recipe is complete, the extras are real ones, and the maker has clearly aimed at one breed and not at a size band. If your Cavalier is thriving on it, nothing in our reading contradicts that. We are marking the label, and this label holds a great deal back.

Ingredients, as declared: Dehydrated poultry protein, rice, maize, animal fats, vegetable protein isolate*, beet pulp, maize flour, hydrolysed animal proteins, maize gluten, minerals, fish oil, soya oil, fructo-oligo-saccharides (0.34%), hydrolysed yeast (source of manno-oligo-saccharides), yeasts extracts (source of betaglucans), borage oil, marigold extract (source of lutein).

The recipe opens on dehydrated poultry protein, which names a group of birds without settling on one. That group holds chicken, turkey, duck and goose, and the bird can be swapped with nothing changing on the bag. No percentage shows how much of the kibble it accounts for. Rice and maize follow immediately. Even without figures, that shows where most of the recipe comes from.

Halfway down the list, maize gluten is worth understanding. Maize milling produces it as a by-product, and it is used to raise the protein figure on the analysis. Plant protein of that kind does not carry the same amino acid profile a growing puppy gets from meat. Protein reads 30.0% on the pack, converting to 32.6% of dry matter, but part of that total is doing its work from a cereal rather than an animal.

The two additions that set this apart are taurine at 2.2 g and L-carnitine at 400 mg per kilo. Taurine is an amino acid concentrated in meat and seafood, and dogs can usually make it for themselves. L-carnitine does its work turning fat into energy the body can use. Both turn up far more often on adult formulations than on puppy ones. Putting them here looks like a considered choice.

The coat entry is borage oil, rich in gamma-linolenic acid, sitting alongside fish oil and soya oil in the fat department. The gut support runs through fructo-oligo-saccharides at 0.34%, manno-oligo-saccharides from hydrolysed yeast and betaglucans from yeast extracts, with marigold extract supplying lutein at the end.

The additive panel is fully dosed: vitamin A at 30500 IU, vitamin D3 at 800 IU and vitamin E at 630 mg per kilo. Zinc is at 104 mg, manganese at 50 mg, iron at 38 mg, copper at 12 mg, iodine at 3.8 mg and selenium at 0.07 mg. Clinoptilolite at 10 g per kilo works on the kibble itself, and yucca extract at 125 mg is a stool odour entry.

Where the pack falls quiet is the analysis. Protein at 30.0%, fat at 18.0%, fibre at 1.5% and ash at 7.6% are printed, and after that nothing: no moisture, no energy declaration and no calcium. A small breed pup is less exposed to a calcium error than a large breed one. Calcium remains the figure most worth seeing on a food sold for growth, and here it is simply absent.

£9.16 a kilo, sold in a 1.5kg bag.

The feeding guide is written towards a finished adult weight of 7kg, and a Cavalier pup passes through several different daily amounts before reaching it. Let the chart move with your puppy's age rather than fixing on one measure and leaving it there.