Vale Pet Foods Vale RAW Meat Blend Minces: Duck, Turkey & Chicken review

The two minces finish a whisker apart, with the three bird blend a shade ahead. Duck, Turkey & Chicken and Turkey & Beef both reach our Outstanding band, which is the band the typical raw food occupies. No category scores higher with us than raw, so landing there is no small thing. Both minces read Outstanding for protein and processing, for nutritional balance and for value, with transparency Excellent. The gap comes down to how the two analyses balance out, since the labels are equally clean.

Put plainly, the three bird blend is the leaner and more protein-heavy of the pair, and the Turkey & Beef is the richer one. The working dog and the couch dog can each be matched without leaving the range.

Ingredients, as declared: 34% Duck, 33% Turkey & 33% Chicken. (inc Offal and Bone of all 3 proteins)

You can read either label in one breath, and every entry on it is animal. There are no vegetables, no cereals, no oils and no supplement blend, which is why carbohydrate estimates at zero on both. What you are choosing between is which animals do the work and in what proportion.

The Duck, Turkey & Chicken is the more unusual construction, at 34% duck with turkey and chicken at 33% each, and the label states that offal and bone come from all three. Duck is a meat plenty of dogs meet rarely, digestible and well liked, and pairing it with two everyday birds gives a wide amino acid spread in one mince. Protein converts to 65.8% of dry matter, the higher of the two by a distance.

The Turkey & Beef is the more conventional pairing and the more itemised label. Turkey takes 60% with bone declared at 10% inside that. Beef follows with meat at 20% and heart at 10%, plus 5% each of liver and kidney. Heart is dense working muscle. Liver and kidney are the parts that carry an animal's micronutrition, and the organ share here is a proper one, not a token.

With no added minerals here, calcium comes from bone, the standard practice in raw feeding. The ash figures follow the recipes: 6.3% of dry matter on the three bird mince and 9.5% on the Turkey & Beef. Neither label prints a calcium figure, so the bone declaration is what you are working from.

The analyses divide cleanly. The three bird mince is the leaner, at 31.2% fat on a dry matter basis and an estimated 151 kcal per 100g. The Turkey & Beef is the richer, at 46.4% fat and an estimated 184 kcal per 100g. That difference matters more than the flavour names do, because it changes portion size noticeably for the same dog.

Duck at 34% with turkey and chicken at 33% apiece, and the label confirms offal and bone come from all three birds. Protein converts to 65.8% of dry matter with fat at 31.2%, making this the leaner of the pair, and at an estimated 151 kcal per 100g it feeds in the larger portions. It is listed for adult dogs.

Both minces are £5.40 a kilo and both are sold in 1kg packs.

For a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, take about 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75). That is roughly 557 grams of the three bird mince at £3.01 a day, or 456 grams of the Turkey & Beef at £2.46. The per-kilo figure is the same on both, so the gap is energy density: the leaner mince feeds in larger portions.