Vet's Kitchen Sensitive Care Adult: Salmon & Sweet Potato review

Both of these read as Good band foods with us, which places them level with the middle of the adult dry market. The salmon sits a shade ahead of the pork. The figures explain why, with the plant side doing a fair amount of work. Protein converts to 25.0% of dry matter in both, and carbohydrate to 47.3% in the pork and 47.9% in the salmon, close to the 46.2% a typical adult dry food carries. What a band cannot express is the actual reason to reach for either bag, which is a short and fully named ingredient list built for a dog whose skin or stomach has been giving trouble. On that job they do better than the reading suggests.

Ingredients, as declared: Salmon 40% (including Dried Salmon 21%, Freshly Prepared Salmon 9%, Salmon Oil 9%, Salmon Gravy 1%), Sweet Potato 31%, Peas, Potato 6%, Beet Pulp, Lucerne, Chicory Pulp (2.3% as a source of prebiotic FOS), Minerals, Brewer's Yeast, Glucosamine 177 mg/kg, Methylsulfonylmethane 177 mg/kg, Chondroitin Sulphate 124 mg/kg.

The pork recipe declares 33% pork, split into dried pork at 22%, pork fat at 9.5% and pork gravy at 1.5%. Salmon totals 40% across four entries: 21% dried, 9% freshly prepared, 9% as salmon oil and 1% as salmon gravy. Fresh meat is mostly water until the oven takes it out. The dried entry is what carries both recipes.

What is absent from these lists is as useful as what is on them. The small print hides no unnamed fat, no generic oil and no hydrolysate. You get exactly the species the front of the bag promises, and nothing besides. An elimination trial wants exactly this, and not enough labels deliver it.

If your dog has already been round the usual meats, the pork is the more interesting bag of the two. Pork is new to a great many dogs. A dog cannot learn to react to a protein it has never met. It is a rich meat, though, and this is the fattier of the two recipes.

The pork puts sweet potato at 22% and potato at 20%, near enough level. The salmon tips it further, sweet potato at 31% with potato back at 6%. Peas, beet pulp and lucerne fill in behind. No grain appears in either recipe, which is a deliberate choice for this audience rather than a nod to fashion.

Chicory pulp at 2.4% in the pork and 2.3% in the salmon is the prebiotic, and it is a good one. Inulin is what chicory root brings: soluble fibre, and something for the large intestine's own bacteria to live on. The joint entries below it are dosed in full, glucosamine and MSM at 177 mg/kg each with chondroitin sulphate at 124 mg/kg. The mineral panel is partly chelated, with zinc at 154mg and iron at 96mg per kilo.

Salmon adds up to 40% here, 21% of it dried and 9% of it salmon oil. For a dog whose coat needs help, that is a generous amount of marine omega 3. Sweet potato carries the starch here at 31%, and brewer's yeast adds B vitamins the pork recipe goes without. It is also the leaner bag, with fat at 13.0% of dry matter.

£6.12 a kilo for the pork recipe, which comes in 2.2kg, 6kg and 12kg bags, and £8.07 a kilo for the salmon, which comes in 2.2kg and 6.6kg.

As a guide, a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs about 231 grams of the pork a day, or 241 grams of the salmon. That assumes around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), and works out at £1.42 and £1.95 a day. For a dog between 11kg and 25kg the pork label asks 135 to 310 grams and the salmon 140 to 300. Where your own dog lands inside that is a question for the waistline.