Skinners’s Dog Food (Suffolk)

“There’s no greater feeling than being out in the great outdoors, and it’s even better with a dog by your side.” True enough, but Skinner’s, a dog food manufacturer, appears to be focussed solely on those for whom the ‘great outdoors’ means shooting wildlife and who own ‘working dogs’. Skinner’s branding leans heavily on working and gun dogs with a range called “Field and Trial’. Their website primarily features gun dogs like spaniels and retrievers, and for their anniversary celebrations in 2021 made their target audience even clearer by temporarily changing their logo to a pheasant, which of course is a non-native bird released in vast numbers by the shooting industry to be killed in the ‘great outdoors’ and retrieved by ‘working dogs’. Its blog carries on in a similar vein, glorifying, for instance, the shooting at Gleneagles. Skinner’s has been sponsoring field trials and events within the working dog sector for over 40 years and was a sponsor of the Game Fair 2024. The Game Fair, organised by Stable Events, is sold as “An annual gathering for people passionate about countryside pursuits” but – as its name implies – looks more like a celebration of killing wildlife.