Royal Canin Starter Mother & Babydog Ultra Soft Mousse review

Our scoring is built around everyday feeding, and this mousse is doing a specialist job, so the Average result needs that context sitting beside it. The typical adult wet food reaches our Excellent band and the mousse finishes well behind. The reasons will be familiar by now: no animal named, no grain named, nothing given a proportion, and calcium left undeclared on a product partly intended for growth. Protein and processing and transparency each read Average on that basis, and only nutritional balance comes back Outstanding.

What the analysis does show is strong. Protein converts to 46.5% of dry matter, the carbohydrate estimate comes in at 13.0% and the moisture is declared at 78.5%. Together those describe a genuinely concentrated food of the kind a nursing bitch actually needs. Royal Canin has been supporting breeders through weaning for a very long time, and this product is reached for constantly in whelping rooms for good reasons. The placement reflects a label that will not show its working, nothing more.

Ingredients, as declared: Meat and animal derivatives, cereals, derivatives of vegetable origin, minerals, oils and fats, milk and milk derivatives, yeasts.

Milk and milk derivatives is the entry that explains what this product is for. A puppy coming off the teat is still set up to digest milk, and keeping some in the first solid food makes the transition gentler on a very young gut. It is also the entry that rules the mousse out for any dog with a dairy problem, which is a small population but a real one.

Above it, the familiar umbrella terms do the heavy lifting. Meat and animal derivatives heads the list, a legal description covering the fleshy parts and processing derivatives of warm blooded land animals and spanning material of every quality. Cereals and derivatives of vegetable origin follow, neither of them tied to a named source, and oils and fats sit below the minerals. Yeasts close the list, bringing B vitamins and a savoury smell that helps get a reluctant puppy started.

The analysis is where this product earns its place. Protein converts to 46.5% of dry matter and fat to 27.9%, both high, and the carbohydrate estimate is 13.0% of dry matter, lower than the 15.8% the typical adult wet food carries. A pregnant or nursing bitch has energy and protein needs well above her normal ones, and a weaning puppy has to get a great deal of nutrition into a very small stomach. A concentrated recipe is exactly the right shape for both.

The gap in all this is calcium. A growing puppy has a narrow window for getting calcium right. The label prints no figure for it, and nothing on the pack lets you check the mousse against what a litter needs. That is not a claim that anything is wrong with it, and Royal Canin will have formulated to a growth standard. It does mean the check has to happen through your vet or your breeder rather than on the back of the pack.

The added panel is short and dosed: vitamin D3 at 170 IU per kilo, iron at 6 mg, iodine at 0.3 mg, copper at 2.5 mg, manganese at 1.7 mg and zinc at 17 mg. Clinoptilolite at 2 g per kilo goes in as a technological aid. Vitamin D3 is the one to notice here, since it works hand in hand with calcium in a growing skeleton, and it is printed while its partner is not.

£11.59 a kilo. The servings are 195 g, twelve to a pack.

Fed to a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, which is not the dog this mousse is meant for, feeding would be about £10.16 a day, or roughly 877 grams. That assumes around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate) and our estimated 96 kcal per 100g. A nursing bitch and a hungry litter will move through it a good deal faster than that.