Wilsons Working Dog Cold Pressed: Pork review

All five recipes come to rest in our Good band. That is the band the middle of the cold-pressed field occupies too, so this range keeps company with its category. The five all come to rest in that one band, so the choice is properly your dog's to make.

Every label opens with a named meat, the joint pair carries printed doses, and the vitamin panel reads line by line. That is what earns the band. It is the starch base that holds the range where it is. It does more of the carrying here than the meat does.

Ingredients, as declared: Dry ground pork (32%), peas, tapioca, sweet potato, chicken fat, beet pulp, chicken hydrolysate, apple, DL-methionine, L-tryptophan, mannan-oligosaccharides (MOS), yucca schidigera, glucosamine (200 mg/kg), chondroitin sulphate (150 mg/kg), chicory, inulin, cranberry dandelion root, marigold, natural antioxidants, rosemary extract.

Cold pressing is the method behind the whole range. The mixture goes through a press at low temperature and never sees an extruder. The pellet that comes out will break up in liquid and never puffs. Fast eaters and delicate stomachs are the reason owners keep coming back to the format. Wilsons sells this range under a working dog label, though the feeding guide stretches from the smallest toy dogs up to giants at 60kg.

Each recipe leads on a dried ground meat: 32% in the Chicken and the Pork, 30% in the Beef and the Fish, 28% in the Lamb. Dried matters here. With the water gone, a third of dried meat carries considerably more actual animal than a third of fresh meat would. Protein converts to between 25.0% and 31.5% of dry matter across the five.

Sweet potato, peas and tapioca fill the rest, and between them they put carbohydrate at 45.2% to 47.2% of dry matter, a shade above the 43.2% typical of cold-pressed food. The sweet potato and the peas do more than starch: there is fibre in them, and a spread of micronutrients. Tapioca brings starch and very little besides, so it is the entry doing the least work on any of these lists, while beet pulp adds gentle fibre near the tail.

The joint pair is printed properly, glucosamine at 200 mg/kg and chondroitin sulphate at 150 mg/kg on every recipe, which is more disclosure than most ranges offer. Two prebiotics sit alongside them, mannan-oligosaccharides drawn from yeast cell wall and inulin from chicory root. Both are there for the bacteria that do the good work in the gut. Yucca schidigera, cranberry, dandelion root and marigold finish things off at trace level.

The vitamin and mineral panel is itemised in full with every dose printed, down to the biotin and the choline chloride. DL-methionine and L-tryptophan appear as named amino acids and not inside a blend. Selenium arrives as sodium selenite in four of the five, the form nearly every maker reaches for. The Fish recipe's panel prints no selenium entry at all, which reads as a gap in the printed list rather than a difference in the recipe itself.

Dry ground pork at 32%, with apple as the single piece of fruit and chicken fat and chicken hydrolysate carrying the fat and the flavour. Ash is the highest in the range at 13.0% of dry matter, so plenty of mineral travels with the meat, protein converts to 26.1%, and energy reads 344 kcal per 100g.

Per kilo, the Beef, Chicken and Pork are £3.74, the Lamb is £3.93 and the Fish is £4.18. Every recipe comes in a 15kg bag, sold singly or as a box of three bags.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition works out at about 840 kcal a day on the standard maintenance estimate (110 × bodyweight^0.75). That lands at between 224g and 245g of pellet depending on the recipe, or £0.84 to £0.96 a day.