The Hunger Of The Wolf Adult: Lamb and Rice review

All six recipes settle in our Good band, where a typical adult dry food also ends its run. Reaching furthest up it are the beef, the toy and mini chicken with lamb, and Light Chicken. The pattern behind that is easy enough to see. These are meat meal recipes with maize, wheat or rice behind them, so the animal share is honest but not large. The ones that do best simply push the named meat highest.

None of that should put you off. A meat meal is a legitimate way to build a kibble. The prebiotic and antioxidant small print is better than a lot of the range's neighbours manage. Every recipe here has been thought about for a specific size of dog, not poured into one bag for everybody.

Ingredients, as declared: Lamb meal (20%), rice, maize, fish meal, maize germs, poultry fat, hydrolyzed poultry liver, flaxseed, yeast, coconut oil, MOS (mannanoligosaccharides), FOS (fructooligosaccharides), beta-glucans, glucosamine, chondroitin, Yucca, feed additives (vitamins A, D3 and E, choline-chloride, L-carnitine, biotin, chelated form of zinc and manganese, organic selenium, lysine, methionine, Enterococcus faecium).

Meat meals are the backbone of the whole range: dehydrated beef at 25% in the beef recipe, chicken meal from 27% up to 30.5% across the chicken ones, lamb meal at 20% in the lamb. A meal goes into the mixer with its water gone. So a figure like 30.5% does far more work in the bowl than the same figure beside a fresh meat would. The trade is that you lose the reassurance of seeing whole meat named on the front.

Behind the meat sits a conventional starch base. Maize and wheat appear in the chicken and lamb recipes, rice in most of them, brown rice and pea in the beef, and peas in the Light. Estimated carbohydrate runs between 40.8% of dry matter in the beef and 47.8% in the large breed chicken. The typical adult dry food sits at 46.2%, so most of the range comes in at or a little under the norm.

The small print is the pleasant surprise here. MOS and FOS are both prebiotics, and the bacteria they feed live in the large intestine. Beta-glucans turn up alongside them, and in the smaller breed recipes dried chicory and brewery yeast bring the same thing from natural sources. Green tea and rosemary extract carry the antioxidant load in the beef, and a plant extract blend of rosemary, grape, turmeric, citrus and clove does the same job in the toy and Light recipes.

Joint support appears where the dogs are most likely to want it. Glucosamine and chondroitin are listed in the large and giant breed chicken and in the lamb and rice, and Light Chicken goes further by printing glucosamine, chondroitin and MSM at 50 mg per kilo each. Those are modest doses and the label states them plainly, with no headline made of them. That is a fair way to present them.

The candid part is how much of the animal content stays unnamed. Poultry fat runs through most of the range and hydrolysed poultry liver appears in several. The beef recipe adds lamb protein alongside its beef. For a dog with no reactions this changes nothing at the bowl. Keeping a particular bird away from your dog means thinking about the poultry entries.

One label habit worth praising: calcium is declared across the range, working out at 1.85% of dry matter in the beef down to 1.2% in Light Chicken. The three breed sized chicken recipes plus the lamb all sit at levels a growing large breed could live with. The other side of the coin is that the English declaration stops at vitamins A, D3 and E, so the chelated zinc, manganese and organic selenium named inside the ingredient list carry no figures.

Lamb meal at 20% with rice and maize behind it, and fish meal in support, so lamb leads the label without being the only animal in the bowl. Glucosamine, chondroitin and yucca all appear, and calcium reads 1.52% of dry matter. Energy lands at 357 kcal per 100g, right on the norm for a dry food.

Per kilo, the large breed chicken, the lamb and rice and Light Chicken are each £2.71. The small and medium chicken is £3.17, the toy and mini £3.52 and the beef and brown rice £3.86.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £0.64 and £0.87 a day across the range. The working figure is 840 kcal a day, on the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. Daily portions run from about 226 grams on the beef to about 264 grams on Light Chicken, which is the calorie difference between them turning up in the scoop.