Tails.com Inner Vitality Dry: Mature Salmon & Sweet Potato — Sensitive Grain-Free review

The salmon recipes come out best here, the adult version leading the five with the mature one a whisker behind. Both sit inside our Good band, where the typical adult dry food also ends up. The chicken and rice recipes hold that band as well, a little lower down it, and the reason is at the top of their lists. Whole maize takes first place, so the meat in the bowl starts from a lower base than the sweet potato recipes manage.

None of that makes them a bad dinner. Poultry meal at 26% or 27.5% is a concentrated protein source, the extras are the same across all five bags, and plenty of dogs eat this way happily for years. It does mean that if you have a free choice between the two halves of the range, the salmon recipes are the stronger build.

Ingredients, as declared: Sweet Potato 34%, Salmon Meal 24%, Potato, Hydrolysed Salmon 10%, Poultry Fat, Poultry Gravy, Peas, Whole linseed* 2.5%, Minerals, Salmon Oil* 2%, Yeast Cell Walls 0.1% (as a source of MOS and Beta glucans 0.03%), Chicory Root Extract 0.1% (as a source of prebiotic Inulin and FOS), Glucosamine Hydrochloride 0.06%, Chondroitin Sulphate 0.045%, Yucca Schidigera Extract 0.015%, Dried Spearmint, Tyndallised Lactobacillus helveticus 0.005%, Tyndallised Lactocaseibacillus paracasei 0.005%. * Sources of Omega 3 and 6, Paraprobiotics

The chicken recipes do the sums for you at the foot of the label: 34% chicken in the medium and large version and 35% in the toy and small one. That total is poultry meal at 26% or 27.5% plus freshly prepared chicken at 10%. That first figure is where the working protein comes from. Meal is the dried form and its protein comes through the oven whole. Sitting above it is whole maize, a perfectly digestible cereal once cooked but a cereal all the same, and its position is the single biggest thing separating these two recipes from the salmon ones.

The salmon recipes turn the construction around. Sweet potato leads at 35.5% in the adult and 34% in the mature, with salmon meal at 25.5% and 24% behind it and hydrolysed salmon at 10% on both. Hydrolysing chops the protein into fragments small enough that most immune systems no longer recognise them. That is why it shows up in recipes written for sensitive dogs, and it doubles as a palatant for a fussy eater. Poultry fat and poultry gravy still follow, so the fish is the meat here without the recipe being fish alone.

Every bag in the range carries the same support cast. Yeast cell walls at 0.1% supply MOS with beta glucans at 0.03%, and chicory root extract at 0.1% brings inulin and FOS. Both are prebiotic fibres, and they feed the bacteria a dog already has in its large intestine. The two tyndallised cultures at 0.005% each are heat treated bacteria, which sounds like a contradiction until you know that the fragments still do their work without needing to survive the bag.

Glucosamine hydrochloride and chondroitin sulphate appear on every label with a figure attached, from 0.02% and 0.015% on the medium and large chicken recipe up to 0.06% and 0.045% on the mature salmon one. Taurine at 500 mg is added to four of the five, the toy and small chicken recipe being the exception, and it is an amino acid usually included with the heart in mind.

Every trace mineral is printed with an amount: zinc at 100 mg on the chicken recipes and 75 mg on the salmon ones, iron at 60 mg, manganese at 50 mg. They come as oxides and sulphates, the plainer forms. A dog absorbs them slightly less readily than it would the chelated forms. Whole linseed at 2.5% and salmon oil at 2% run through all five as the plant and marine omega sources, and dried spearmint sits near the end of each list as an aromatic.

The same grain free build tuned for an older dog. Fat comes down to 13.6% of dry matter and energy to 344 kcal per 100 grams, the gentlest in the range, while glucosamine doubles to 0.06% and chondroitin trebles to 0.045%. Salmon meal eases back to 24% and potato moves ahead of the hydrolysed salmon.

The chicken and rice recipes are £3.27 a kilo, the salmon pair £3.45 and the puppy recipe £3.36, all sold in 2 kg bags.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition eats somewhere between 227 and 244 grams a day across these recipes, which works out at £0.74 to £0.84 a day. All of that rests on around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The labels give their own tables by weight, and between the two the waistline decides.