Tribal 80% Gourmet Sausage: Fresh Lamb review

Our Outstanding band holds all four sausages, and there is barely anything between them. The turkey and the duck come a shade ahead of the lamb and the chicken. On our scoring wet food does well as a category, with the middle of that shelf reading Excellent, so the question is by how much this range clears the typical mark. Protein and processing reads Outstanding on all four. So do nutritional balance and transparency. What earns those marks is simple enough: a very high share of named animal, almost nothing else in the recipe, and a percentage beside everything that matters.

Ingredients, as declared: Fresh Lamb 80% (meat and organs), Carrots (4%), Chickpeas (4%), Minerals, Linseed Oil.

Eighty per cent of each sausage is one fresh animal, and the label counts meat and organs inside that figure rather than beside it. Organ meat belongs in a wet recipe, being where a great deal of the natural vitamin and mineral content lives, so this is not a headline number propped up with filler. Protein converts to between 39.2% and 44.2% of dry matter across the four, which is a meat-led analysis by any reading.

The plant side is two ingredients and then it stops. Parsnips carry the chicken and turkey while carrots do the same job for the duck and lamb, each at 4%, with chickpeas alongside at 4%. Even so the carbohydrate estimate reads between 17.5% and 20.3% of dry matter against the 15.8% typical of adult wet food. That figure comes by difference and is never measured directly, so on a list this short it mops up anything the analysis does not separately name.

Linseed oil closes the duck, lamb and turkey lists and is the range's one added fat, bringing omega-3 in its plant form. The chicken sausage does without it. That leaves it lightest on fat, at 24.2% on a dry matter basis, where the turkey reaches 34.7%.

The added panel is deliberately short: vitamin D3 and vitamin E at 25mg per kilo, with zinc at 15mg, manganese at 3mg and iodine at 0.5mg. A recipe this meat-heavy brings much of its own micronutrition in through the organs, which is how a small panel can read as confidence rather than economy.

These are dense sausages by wet food standards, running from 123 to 150 kcal per 100g where the typical adult wet food sits at 97. Portions come down accordingly, below what the wet shelf usually asks for. Anyone who has tried to get a day's calories into a small dog will welcome that.

Fresh lamb at 80%, the only red meat here, on the same carrot and chickpea base as the duck. Its analysis is the most even of the four, with protein at 40.1% and fat at 28.1% of dry matter, and lamb tends to be the flavour a poultry-weary dog takes to fastest.

The chicken and turkey are £9.05 a kilo and the duck and lamb are £10.39 a kilo, in 300g and 750g sizes.

As a guide, feeding a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at between £5.07 and £6.18 a day depending on the animal. Behind that sits 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate). That comes to roughly 560 to 683 grams. On the label's own table a 25kg dog is given 700 grams a day of the duck, lamb or turkey, and 930 grams of the chicken.