Wildways Adult Wet review

All four recipes land in our Excellent band, with barely anything between them. The choice here is a question of which meat suits your dog, and not of quality. We score wet well as a category, and the middle of the adult wet shelf already reaches the same band. These declared meat percentages put this range right in among that company. Transparency reads Outstanding on every recipe, with nutritional balance Excellent or Outstanding. Protein and processing comes in Good or Excellent, and value reads Excellent across the four.

Fibre is what stops it climbing further. Lignocellulose is a purified powder, with none of the whole food behind it. The beef with venison recipe carries crude fibre at 14.9% of dry matter, which is a lot for a wet recipe. That is a construction choice, and it is the one place the range trades a little quality of ingredient for a functional effect.

Ingredients, as declared: Fresh Duck (51%), Chicken (14%), Blackberries (4%), Pea Flour (2%), Lignocellulose (0.7%), Salmon Oil (0.5%), Calcium Carbonate (0.3%), Dried Rosemary (0.01%)

Look at this range for the meat percentages. Fresh duck at 51% with chicken at 14%. Fresh wild boar at 50% with lamb at 14%. Fresh turkey at 59% with ostrich at 4%. Fresh chicken at 33% with beef at 26% and venison at 4%. Every animal on every label is named and nearly every one is numbered. Protein converts to between 35.6% and 41.0% of dry matter across the four.

The fruit and vegetable side changes with the format. The 400g recipes take blackberries at 4% and nothing else, while the 300g pair go for pumpkin at 4% with apple at 3% or 4% and a little kale. All of it is present in small printed amounts, and none of it is carrying the recipe.

Pea flour is the one plant entry doing real work. It is milled from roasted peas and is high in fibre. There is a reasonable amount of plant protein in it too, and in the small amounts used here it is useful. Plant protein is not as digestible for a dog as animal protein, so read it as a binder and a fibre source, and leave it out of the meat figure.

Lignocellulose is the range's most debatable ingredient. A pale powder made as a by-product of agriculture or milling, it is purified plant fibre that adds bulk without adding calories. Whole fruit and vegetable fibre is the better source, and lignocellulose is the reason the fibre figures here read higher than a wet food normally does. It appears at between 0.5% and 1% on the three labels that carry it.

The 300g pair add a small functional package the 400g recipes do without. Mannan-oligosaccharides at 0.5% and inulin at 0.5% as a source of FOS are both prebiotic fibres, food for the gut bacteria you want, and taurine at 800 mg and thyme come with them. Salmon oil runs from 0.5% to 1% across the range, bringing omega-3, and calcium carbonate at 0.3% tops up the minerals on the two 400g recipes.

The added panels are not consistent between recipes, and it is worth knowing which label you are reading. The duck recipe declares the fullest of them: vitamin A at 800 IU, D3 at 250 IU, E at 125 mg, B1 at 1 mg and biotin at 0.4 mg. Chelated zinc, iron, manganese and iodine come with it. The wild boar label prints only D3 at 190 IU, E at 164 IU and biotin at 0.4 mg. Declared calcium sits between 0.91% and 2.81% of dry matter, which is a wide spread but comfortably within what an adult dog handles.

Fresh duck at 51% with chicken at 14%, blackberries at 4% and salmon oil at 0.5%, in the 400g format. This is the recipe with the fullest vitamin and trace element panel in the range, its calcium sits at 1.14% of dry matter, and energy comes in at 104 kcal per 100g.

£7.48 a kilo on the two 400g recipes and £9.97 a kilo on the 300g pair.

Around 840 kcal a day is the mark for a 15kg adult dog in moderate condition, taking the standard maintenance estimate of 110 × bodyweight^0.75. Daily feeding here runs between 750 and 840 grams, and £6.04 to £8.13 a day according to the recipe.