Arden Grange Senior Dog Chicken & Rice

Senior is a marketing age rather than a biological one. No dog wakes up old on a birthday, and a bag has no way of knowing when yours did — which is why the useful question about a senior food is never whether your dog qualifies, but what is actually different inside it compared with the adult version standing next to it on the shelf.

Here some of that difference is quantified rather than claimed. Arden Grange put glucosamine at 740mg/kg, MSM at 740mg/kg and chondroitin sulphate at 520mg/kg, and add L-carnitine at 50mg/kg, which they connect to fat metabolism and keeping older dogs in shape. The recipe is chicken at 28% — dried chicken 23% and fresh chicken 5% — with rice at 23%, then maize, beet pulp, chicken oil, linseed at 3%, chicken digest, dried krill, yeast and whole dried egg at 1%. Prebiotic FOS runs at 900mg/kg and MOS at 400mg/kg, with dried cranberries at 400mg/kg.

• 6KG bag, complete food for older dogs
• Chicken 28% (dried chicken 23%, fresh chicken 5%), rice 23%
• Glucosamine 740mg/kg, MSM 740mg/kg, chondroitin sulphate 520mg/kg
• L-carnitine 50mg/kg
• Crude protein 22%, crude fat 12%, crude fibre 3.5%
• No added wheat, gluten, soy or dairy

The two analyses we have been given do not agree with each other. One version of Arden Grange's analytical constituents for this food gives calcium 1% and phosphorus 0.75%; another gives calcium 1.5% and phosphorus 1%. That is not a small discrepancy on a food aimed at older dogs, because those two minerals are precisely what people ask about at that age — so read them off the bag in your hand rather than from this page, and if your vet has asked you to watch either figure, ring Arden Grange before you buy a sack of it. Everything else in the analysis is consistent between the two.

Who it's for: owners of an older dog who want the joint ingredients stated as amounts rather than as a phrase on the front, and anyone whose dog has slowed down but is still doing well on a rice-based food.