Always Rotate Your Dog or Cat's Food
4 min read
Imagine eating the same meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day of your life. No deviation to other foods, just the same exact meal every day. It would stink! Truth is, that’s what most pet parents are doing to their furry family.
Dogs & cats in their natural habitat eat a variety of different foods (Chicken, pheasant, beef, duck, lamb, the list goes on…).
That’s why it’s so important to mimic their instinctual diet at home with variety! Yes, you can totally rotate within one brand of food, but that will only take them so far. Reason being - some dog food companies only switch the meat from formula to formula (all the fruits, veggies, and vitamins stay the same). It’s like eating the same salad every single day, but all you’re doing is switching the meat on top.
Not one food can provide everything your dog or cat needs to thrive and be healthy. Switch within brands, and outside of brands. By rotating their food you’re giving them a variety of different nutrient profiles. Remember that meats, fruits, and veggies all offer up a plethora of different healthy benefits; so let’s rotate and get healthy!
Quick Fact: Dogs & cats can develop allergies to foods by being fed the same food over and over again.
The Pet industry has always sold us on brand loyalty. Companies want you to buy their brand of food for 15 years straight, and they’ve done a great job of making us think that feeding only one food is the way to go.
“Don’t switch foods or they’ll get an upset stomach.” I hear this a lot. Well, let’s think about this for a second. If you eat pizza for a year straight, and one day you wake up and decide to eat salad, how do you think your body would respond? You’d definitely end up “detoxing” a bit. The reason is because our body’s adapt to whatever diet we’ve been on for an extended period of time.
Let’s use me as an example. I’m vegan. I have been for the past two years. If I decided to eat meat today, my stomach would probably get upset because it’s adapted to a plant based diet. Therefore, I would need to slowly introduce meat back into my diet to avoid gastrointestinal upset. Eventually my body would adapt to a meat based diet, and I would be able to eat meat again without issues.
This is the same thing that happens to dogs and cats that have been eating the same food for an extended period of time. They’re body adapts to that food. All they need, is to be slowly introduced to new foods, and with time their bodies will adapt to a rotational diet.
I’d say 50% of our customers actually buy 2-3 different bags of food when they come in. And that’s great! They’ll feed one food for breakfast, and the other for dinner. They rotate frequently, and their pets are much happier and healthier because of the rotation.
We recommend rotating foods at least every two weeks, and ideally daily. Remember, we want to mimic how they eat in their natural habitat. So, if you decide to feed chicken for three days, turkey for two days, beef for five days, that would work great. If you wanted to feed something different every meal that would work too. Just as long you’re using some form of rotation they’re going to be much healthier.
I encourage you to rotate EVERYTHING. Food, treats, toys, supplements, collars, leashes, and everything else in your furry friends life. Variety keeps your dog or cat feeling happy & healthy. They’re intelligent animals, and they love it when you fulfill their needs.
Do you have a success story about implementing rotation into your pet’s diet? Tell us all about it by emailing us your story (include photos/video if you have them).
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