Virbac Veterinary HPM Adult Small & Toy review

The Good band holds this recipe and the ordinary run of adult dry foods alike, so the band on its own will not tell them apart. The detail does. Protein is high, the starch load sits well below what a kibble usually carries, and the added mineral panel is dosed in full. Against that, the meat entries name two species at once and the fat names only a family, and those are the marks that stop it climbing. For a small dog with places to be, it is an easy food to feed.

Ingredients, as declared: Dehydrated pork and poultry proteins; Rice; Poultry Fats; Peas; Hydrolysed pork and poultry proteins; Lignocellulose; Minerals; Linseed; Dried (sugar) beet pulp; Fructo-oligosaccharides; Psyllium fibre (Plantago (L.) spp.); Inactivated brewer's yeast; Seaweed meal (Ascophyllum nodosum); Inactivated Lactobacillus helveticus.

Dehydrated pork and poultry proteins sit at the head of this list. That meat goes in dry, and the declaration holds up in the finished kibble. Protein reads 34% as fed and 37.4% of dry matter. Pork is still a novelty in most British bowls, and dogs tend to find it very easy to like.

Poultry fat sits unusually high on this list, third in fact, and it is why energy reaches 370 kcal per 100g. Fat at 17% is the highest in the family, which is entirely deliberate: a toy breed eats a tiny portion, so that portion has to do a full day's work.

Rice is the only cereal, with peas behind it. Carbohydrate comes out at 27.0% as fed and 29.6% of dry matter, against 46.2% for the typical adult dry food, so even the most energetic recipe here keeps its starch in check.

Crude fibre is 5%, the lightest of the group. Psyllium husk and dried sugar beet pulp supply most of it, with lignocellulose alongside. Beet pulp is worth reading properly. It is the fibrous material left when the sugar has been taken out, and nothing on this label is a sweetener. Psyllium is there for the soluble fibre that helps keep stools consistent.

The tail is short and sensible. Linseed carries omega 3 in its plant form, seaweed meal supplies iodine and trace minerals, inactivated brewer's yeast adds B vitamins, and taurine arrives dosed at 1500 mg/kg. Which bird the poultry is stays unsaid, in the protein, in the hydrolysed protein and in the fat. That only matters where one species is being ruled in or ruled out.

£6.29 a kilo, in 1.5kg, 3kg and 7kg bags.

Our standard reference dog, a 15kg adult in moderate condition, is larger than this bag is meant for. On that basis it works out at about 227 grams a day, assuming around 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), or £1.43 a day. The label's own guide is the practical one at this size: 110 grams a day for a 5kg dog and 175 grams at 10kg.