Techni-Cal Lifestages Adult review

Our Good band is where this recipe lands, level with the typical adult dry food and just short of the rung above. Nothing on the list is alarming and the gap is really arithmetic. Second and third place go to wheat and maize. Carbohydrate finishes above what is typical for a kibble, protein at 27.5% of dry matter is moderate, and the mineral doses never make it onto the label.

The recipe stays short and names every meat it uses as a bird. It also packs a great deal of energy into a small volume. For a big dog with a big appetite and no history of grain trouble, those are practical virtues, and this is a food that will keep such a dog in good order.

Ingredients, as declared: Dehydrated chicken, turkey and duck, wheat, maize, chicken fat, beet pulp, salmon oil (cold pressed), brewers yeast, linseed, dried apple, fructo-oligosaccharides, sodium chloride.

Dehydrated chicken, turkey and duck is one entry doing all of the meat work. Dehydrated means the water has already left. That makes it concentrated protein, and it leads this list on merit. The catch is that the three birds are counted together, so there is no telling whether duck is a meaningful part of the recipe or a rounding error. A dog that reacts to chicken cannot be steered around it here.

Wheat and maize follow, and between them they set the character of the food. Both are perfectly digestible for most dogs once cooked, and maize brings a little protein along with its starch. Of the two, wheat is the one that causes debate, since it turns up most often when a dog proves sensitive to something in the bowl. If that describes your dog, the grain free recipes in Techni-Cal's Pure Nature line are built for exactly that job.

Beet pulp handles the fibre and does it well, fermenting slowly enough to firm a stool without loading the gut. Cold pressed salmon oil is a step up from the fish oil a food of this shape usually carries, because pressing it without heat keeps more of the fragile omega 3 fats intact. Brewers yeast brings B vitamins and a good deal of palatability, while linseed adds the plant side of the omega story and dried apple is a small flourish. The fructo-oligosaccharides at the end are a prebiotic fibre for the gut bacteria to work on.

Protein is declared at 25.0% and fat at 14.0%, converting to 27.5% and 15.4% of dry matter, with ash unusually low at 6.6%. Low ash normally says the meat used is lean and not bone heavy. That counts in the recipe's favour, and it is part of why the energy figure comes out as high as 378 kcal per 100 grams. Calcium is declared at 1.48% of dry matter, a comfortable adult level.

The vitamin panel is generous, with vitamin E at 300 mg, niacin at 21.50 mg and choline chloride at 1640 mg among the entries. The fatty acids are printed too, at 5.09 g of omega 3 and 21.17 g of omega 6. What is missing is the trace element list. Zinc, copper, manganese and the rest are certainly in there, since no complete food could be sold without them. The amounts are never published though, and a fully dosed mineral panel is one of the things that lifts a label above its neighbours.

Sold in 2.5 kg and 12 kg bags.

As a portion guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 222 grams a day, working from roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). The label's own table asks 235 grams for a 16kg dog, near enough the same answer. Let the waistline settle anything left over.