Seasonal Dog Food: A Complete Guide

Autumn dog food ideas

Autumn brings an abundance of hearty vegetables and fruits that are ideal for homemade recipes.

Popular autumn dog food ingredients include:

• Pumpkin
• Sweet potatoes
• Parsnips
• Beetroot
• Apples
• Kale
• Brussels sprouts
• Winter cabbage
• Winter sprouting broccoli
• Swiss chard
• Carrots

Autumn dog food recipe ideas:

• Turkey and pumpkin stew
• Beef with sweet potato
• Apple and oat homemade treats

Autumn ingredients also lend themselves well to slow cooking and baking.

Winter dog food ideas

Winter tends to inspires warming, comforting recipes that can be prepared in batches ahead of time.

Suitable winter ingredients for dogs include:

• Root vegetables
• Pumpkin
• Carrots
• Swede
• Leafy greens such as Brussels sprouts

Winter dog food recipe ideas:

• Slow-cooked beef casserole
• Lamb and root vegetable stew
• Chicken and vegetable one-pot meal

Batch cooking during winter can make homemade feeding both convenient and more economical.

Please note, all of these recipes are for complementary meals. They are not designed to be nutritionally complete meals that can be fed on a regular basis.

Seasonal treats

Seasonal feeding extends beyond a dog’s meals.

Ideas for seasonal dog treats include:

Spring

• Homemade herb biscuits
• Carrot (fresh, raw carrot sticks)

Summer

• Frozen yoghurt bites (bite-sized treats of frozen yogurt).
• Fruit ice treats (frozen fruits in a liquid base).
• Watermelon cubes (fresh or frozen).

Autumn

• Pumpkin biscuits
• Apple and oat cookies

Winter

• Sweet potato crisps
• Turkey training treats
• Festive homemade biscuits

Treats should always be fed in moderation — no more than 10% of your dog’s overall diet.

Choosing seasonal ingredients safely

Not every seasonal food enjoyed by people is suitable for dogs.

Avoid ingredients such as:

• Grapes
• Raisins
• Onions
• Leeks
• Chives
• Macadamia nuts
• Chocolate
• Xylitol-containing products

Always introduce new foods gradually and ensure they are prepared plainly without added salt, sugar, or rich sauces.

Maintaining a balanced diet

While changing ingredients provides variety, nutritional balance remains the priority when feeding your dog. Homemade meals still need to contain appropriate sources of protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals for your dog’s age, size, activity level and health status.

Seasonal ingredients should enhance a balanced feeding plan rather than replace its nutritional foundations. That said, nutritional balance in every meal is a foreign concept to a dog. It’s not natural. It’s a foreign concept for any mammal. You and I included.

Dogs was designed to benefit from seasonal nutrition. That’s how they have evolved to be the dogs you and I share our lives with today. It’s how your dog’s ancestors ate. That’s how they evolved over thousands of years. By eating a varied diet from the food available according to the season.

This is known as adaptive physiology — the ability to make the most of the nutrition that is available at the time.

We know for a fact that until recent times, dogs lived longer lives with fewer of today’s canine health problems. I would suggest that not feeding dogs seasonally is where it’s all gone wrong for man’s best friend. That breaking their physiological programming has rendered them susceptible to all manner of health problems that never existed in our grandparent’s day. Our parent’s day for many of us!

Dogs are programmed to eat according to the season. It’s in their DNA. They were designed for periods of great bounty in spring and summer, and for leaner and less bountiful times in autumn and winter. Even periods of fasting, and the benefits fasting is said to bring, would have been perfectly normal for dogs until relatively recent times.

I would ask that you bear this in mind when feeding your dog. If feeding dogs seasonally makes sense to you, consider varying its diet throughout the different seasons.

Balance over time

You don’t need to achieve balance in your dog’s diet on a daily basis. That is actually more likely to result in an unbalanced diet than a balanced one. It can also contribute towards food intolerances whereby the body ultimately reacts negatively to being fed the same thing day in and day out.

Think about how you feed yourself and your family. My guess is that your diet consists mainly of salads and lighter meals in the summer and stodgier, more calorie dense foods in the winter. Am I right? That is the way you and I are physiologically programmed. And it’s exactly the same for man’s best friend.

It’s an established fact that for thousands of years humans and their canine companions ate exactly the same foods. It’s been scientifically proven that each underwent the same genetic changes in order to adapt to the dietary changes required at the time of the First Agricultural Revolution. The period when humans established settlements and began to rely on a relatively restricted farmed diet as opposed to the considerably more varied diet available to the hunter gatherer.

Man and dog underwent those genetic changes at exactly the same time. Between 12,000 and 15,000 years ago. We as human beings benefit from the genetic adaptations in our current diet. Your dog should be allowed to do the same!