Scooch Air Dried Digestive & Anal Gland Wellness review

This recipe lands in our Excellent band, reading Outstanding for protein and processing and for transparency, Good for nutritional balance and Excellent for value. Air dried food has no settled group for us to hold it up against, so the reading stands entirely on the label's own merits. It has a high named meat share, a list itemised down to the parsley, functional inclusions that print their doses, and an analysis that matches what the ingredients promise. The gut-facing ingredients are the part worth dwelling on, because they are chosen rather than decorative.

Ingredients, as declared: Wild Boar (80%), Dried Sweet Potato, Vegetable Oil Glycerine (derived from Rapeseed Oil), Minerals, Dried Pumpkin, Dried Fermented Whey, Chicory Root, Dried Banana, Ascophyllum Nodosum, Beet Pulp, Calcium Carbonate, Broccoli, Dried Parsley, Glucosamine HCL 2,000mg/kg, Chondroitin Sulphate 2,000mg/kg, MSM 1,000mg/kg

Air drying is the quiet difference here. There is no dough cooked at extrusion heat here. The mix is dried slowly and stops at 18.7% declared moisture. That is why the pieces stay pliable and do not snap. What comes out is dense: 465 kcal per 100g, so bowls look small next to what the same dog would eat of a wet food.

Wild boar at 80% is both the recipe's headline and its only meat, which is rarer than it sounds. It is a genuinely novel protein for most British dogs, useful when the usual poultry and red meats have already been tried. Air drying takes out only part of the water, so that 80% translates into a properly meat-led analysis: protein converts to 30.1% of dry matter and fat to 33.6%.

The digestive brief is carried by four ingredients working in different ways. Chicory root supplies inulin. That is a soluble fibre, and the bacteria in the large intestine live on it. Dried fermented whey brings the fermentation itself. Beet pulp brings a moderately fermentable fibre, long used to firm up a loose stool. Ascophyllum nodosum is a brown seaweed and adds iodine along with trace minerals. The anal gland half of the name follows from the same place: firmer, better formed stools are what does the work there, and that comes down to fibre, not medicine.

The plant side is filled out in small named amounts: dried pumpkin and dried banana, then broccoli and dried parsley. The vegetable oil is glycerine, and the label says it comes from rapeseed. Glycerine is the humectant that keeps an air dried piece from going hard in the bag. Naming the oil it came from is more than most labels do.

The joint ingredients are printed with doses in milligrams per kilogram: glucosamine hydrochloride first, then chondroitin sulphate and MSM. Doses on the packet mean you can see what your dog is actually getting, which is worth more than the ingredient names on their own. Calcium carbonate follows as the mineral top-up.

The added panel goes further than the format usually does. Every trace element is declared as a chelate of protein hydrolysates, a form generally chosen because more of it survives digestion, and vitamins A and D3 are dosed alongside them. Selenium comes as sodium selenite. Pet food permits only two forms of it, and this is the one nearly every maker uses.

£41.33 a kilo. The pack is 1.5kg, and the same recipe is also sold as two packs at 3kg and three packs at 4.5kg.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs around 181 grams a day, working from about 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. That comes to roughly £7.47 a day. For a dog between 10 and 20kg the label's own guide sets 133 to 223 grams a day.