Tails.com Inner Vitality Wet: Adult Chicken & Cod — Sensitive Grain-Free review

Every recipe here lands in our Excellent band, and the gaps between them are tiny, so there is no quality trade-off in choosing by protein or by life stage. The middle of the wet shelf sits in that band too, and wet is a strong category on our scoring. The fair reading is that this range holds a good position without towering over its neighbours. Protein and processing comes out Good on every recipe with nutritional balance and transparency both Outstanding, which is a rarer result than it sounds. It takes a named meat share, a printed supplement list and an analysis that backs both up to hold an even line across the board.

Ingredients, as declared: Chicken* 51%, Cod* 14%, Minerals, Salmon Oil* 0.2%, Parsley*, Yeast Cell Walls 0.033% (as a source of MOS and Beta glucans), Chicory Roots Powder 0.033% (as a source of FOS), Glucosamine Hydrochloride 0.01%, Tyndallised Lactobacillus helveticus 0.002%, Tyndallised Lacticaseibacillus paracasei 0.002%, Chondroitin Sulphate 0.002%. *Natural ingredients, Paraprobiotics

The headline is the meat share and it is declared plainly. Chicken at 65% carries the adult, mature and puppy recipes, while the sensitive recipe replaces part of it with cod, running chicken at 51% and cod at 14% for the same total. Nothing on any of the four labels is written as a category term, which is unusual in wet food and is most of why this range reads so cleanly.

Protein converts to between 42.9% and 47.5% of dry matter across the adult recipes and 45.5% on the puppy tray, with fat between 32.5% and 38.6%. Those are rich, meat-driven readings. Estimated carbohydrate stays between 4.5% and 10.0% of dry matter, against the 15.8% that is typical of adult wet food.

Salmon oil is on every recipe, at 0.2% on the adult and sensitive trays, 0.15% on the mature and 0.3% on the puppy. The amount is modest but real, and however chicken-heavy these recipes look, that salmon oil is what stops any of them being a genuine one-animal diet.

The functional tail is where the range earns its name. Yeast cell walls at 0.033% supply mannan-oligosaccharides and beta glucans, and chicory root powder at the same 0.033% supplies fructo-oligosaccharides. Both are prebiotics. They feed the bacteria a dog's large intestine already holds, and they introduce no new ones. Two tyndallised strains follow at 0.002% each, heat-treated bacteria included with the same gut in mind.

Glucosamine hydrochloride and chondroitin sulphate close the list, at 0.01% and 0.002% on the adult, sensitive and puppy recipes and at 0.02% and 0.004% on the mature. The joint support here comes with a real number on it, printed on every label. If your dog already has a diagnosed joint problem, keep to whatever the vet has prescribed, with this as the meal beneath it.

Parsley appears on all four, declared at 0.1% on the adult chicken tray and left unquantified on the rest. It sits there as a garnish and does no nutritional work. The added panel is fully dosed too: vitamin A at 2250IU, vitamin D3 at 140IU and vitamin E at 47mg, with zinc at 12mg, copper at 1.5mg, manganese at 1mg and iodine at 0.3mg. Blueberry extract at 200mg/kg closes it as a sensory addition.

Chicken at 51% and cod at 14%. This is the only recipe here with a second named animal on it, and the only one flagged for sensitive stomachs. Protein converts to 45.0% of dry matter and fat to 32.5%, the leanest of the four, at an estimated 94 kcal per 100g.

The adult, sensitive and mature recipes are sold as a 150 g alu-tray or a 400 g can; the puppy recipe comes in the 150 g tray only.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, working from about 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), the adult chicken recipe comes to roughly 822 grams a day. The mature comes to 873 grams and the sensitive chicken and cod to 896 grams.