Wolf Tucker Primal Complete Raw Meals: Chicken Meal review

Our Excellent band holds this recipe while the typical raw food reaches Outstanding, so it sits among the strongest company on our scoring without leading it. Protein and processing, nutritional balance and transparency all read Outstanding, and value tracks the overall at Excellent. The band is earned on the ingredients and on the honesty of the printed percentages, not on any single flourish.

Raw is the toughest field we assess. Reading Excellent among tubs that mostly reach Outstanding shows how good raw feeding gets, and nothing is missing from this tub.

Ingredients, as declared: 40% Chicken & Bone, 20% Tripe, 20% Ox Heart, 5% Liver, 15% Fruit & Vegetables (Apples, Carrot, Broccoli, Parsley), Flax Oil and Seagreens Kelp, Wheatgrass. 40% Chicken & Bone, 20% Tripe, 20% Ox Heart, 5% Liver, 15% Fruit & Vegetables (Apples, Carrot, Broccoli, Parsley), Flax Oil, Seagreens Kelp, Wheatgrass Powder

Every entry at the front of this list carries a percentage. That is rarer on a raw label than it should be. Chicken and bone at 40%, tripe at 20%, ox heart at 20% and liver at 5% take the animal share to 85%. The remaining 15% is fruit and vegetables, named on the label as apples, carrot, broccoli and parsley.

Heart is the entry that separates this from an ordinary mince. Heart is muscle that works, and in the offal sense it is not an organ at all. It is dense in taurine and B vitamins. At a fifth of the tub it is doing real nutritional work. Tripe brings the digestive enzymes and friendly bacteria that raw feeders prize, while liver at 5% covers the vitamin A and B12 side without overdoing a good thing.

Both the tripe and the ox heart come from cattle, so a chicken-named tub is in practice a two-species recipe. For most dogs that breadth is a bonus, since a mix of animals is where the nutritional range comes from. It does mean this cannot serve as an elimination meal for a dog avoiding beef.

Flax oil supplies the omega 3 fats, seagreens kelp the iodine, and wheatgrass a little green nutrition on top. Flax is a plant source, so the conversion into the long chain fats a dog actually uses is less direct than it would be from a fish oil. It also makes this one of the few complete raw meals that keeps fish off the label altogether.

The analysis is meat shaped, as the list promises. Protein converts to 48.2% of dry matter, fat to 34.6%, and the carbohydrate estimate to 6.9%, a by-difference figure and not an ingredient you can point at. Ash sits at 7.7% of dry matter. For a recipe carrying 40% bone-in chicken that is on the modest side, and with no calcium declared there is no printed figure to read beside it.

£4.98 a kilo. The tub is 500g, and mixed boxes of 6kg, 12kg and 18kg carry it alongside the rest of the Wolf Tucker raw meals.

A 15kg adult dog in moderate condition needs roughly 840 kcal a day (110 × bodyweight^0.75, the standard maintenance estimate), which on this recipe works out at about 509g a day, or £2.54.