ReWilding Your Pet's Diet: Why Species-Appropriate Nutrition Is Where This Starts (And Not Where It Ends)

I've been sitting on this one for a while, and honestly, the thing that finally got me to hit record was a phone call that made me want to blow a gasket.

Someone reached out asking how to help a client who's feeding her dying dog a vegan diet. Not for a medical reason. Because she's vegan and won't bring animal products into her house. And look — I don't get to tell anyone how to love their pet, and I believe every single person is doing the best they can with what they know. But I also can't sit here with a straight face and tell you a dog can thrive on a vegan diet. So let's talk about it.

Five years in, and I'm starting over

The Pet Parenting Reset just hit close to five years. If you're new, hi, I'm Jess — holistic pet health coach, canine nutritionist, raw-nutrition certified with Dr. Ian Billinghurst. None of that makes me special. What I do have is a free podcast, a lot of stubbornness, and a brand-new website, Wild Wellness Pet, that's forcing me to say out loud what I actually believe instead of what's easy.

Here's what I believe: nature provides. Not in a crunchy, anti-medicine, live-in-a-cave way — I'm deeply grateful for emergency medicine, painkillers, and everything allopathic care does when a pet is acutely sick or at end of life. That's not the enemy. The enemy is that we've stopped living with the land and started living on it, and our pets are paying for it right alongside us.

That's the whole premise of ReWilding: bringing your pets — and yourself — back to nature, in mind, body, spirit, and environment. Food is the entry point. It is not the whole story. I've spent a long time letting the message sound like food is the beginning and the end of pet health, and I want to correct that here.

Listen to The Pet Parenting Reset podcast episode here.

Dogs and cats are not small humans

This is the foundation everything else sits on, so let's get it right: dogs are facultative carnivores, cats are obligate carnivores. Cats have evolved anatomic, physiologic, metabolic, and behavioral adaptations for a strictly carnivorous diet — they need nutrients like taurine, arachidonic acid, and preformed vitamin A that only come from animal tissue. Dogs have more metabolic flexibility and can digest starch and plant protein better than cats can, but "flexible" doesn't mean "vegan" (PubMed, Recent Advances in the Nutrition and Metabolism of Dogs and Cats).

Here's the receipt on the vegan question specifically: a peer-reviewed nutrient analysis of commercial vegan dog and cat foods found that every single food tested had at least one nutrient below recommended levels, with some running excess zinc and copper on top of it (PMC, Nutritional inadequacies in commercial vegan foods for dogs and cats). The nutrients that show up short most often — methionine, taurine, calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D — aren't nice-to-haves. Taurine deficiency alone can cause heart disease and blindness.

There's genuinely mixed research here, and I want to be straight about that instead of just picking the studies that prove my point. A systematic review found that in the small number of studies that actually measured dogs' health directly, there wasn't strong evidence of harm — but most of those studies ran for a few weeks on small numbers of animals, which isn't long enough for a deficiency to show up (PMC, The Impact of Vegan Diets on Indicators of Health in Dogs and Cats). Short-term and small-sample isn't the same as safe long-term. If you're going to feed a plant-based diet for any reason, work with someone who can actually verify it's complete — don't guess.

The only reason these diets even come close to meeting requirements are due to the synthetic isolates being added to meet those minimums, which have their own issues. They are xenobiotic, meaning they are chemical substances foreign to a biologic system. This is a problem with most pet feed, but it's worth mentioning here as well, for clarification of where the measurements are coming from. 

And here's the line I won't move on: there's a rare, legitimate clinical case where we pull animal protein short-term to rebuild a badly damaged gut before reintroducing it. That's a last resort, done with intention, not a lifestyle choice made on your dog's behalf because of your diet. Dogs never chose to be vegan. That was always us.

What nature actually built these animals to eat, and why the gut cares

Dr. Billinghurst has a line I think about constantly: humans, dogs, and cats are the most nutritionally researched species in history. We are also among the sickest. Sit with that for a second. We are not under-informed. We are over-processed.

Diet doesn't just fuel your dog — it builds the ecosystem living inside them. Dogs fed a natural, species-appropriate diet show more diverse and abundant gut microbiota than dogs fed commercial feed, and that microbial diversity feeds directly into metabolism, immune function, and even behavior (PMC, Differences in the gut microbiota of dogs fed a natural diet or commercial feed; ScienceDirect, The Gut Microbiome of Dogs and Cats, and the Influence of Diet). This isn't a spreadsheet problem. It's a terrain problem. When the gut is right, a whole lot of downstream chaos — skin, coat, behavior, immune flares — starts to quiet down on its own.

This is also why I'm not interested in relitigating AAFCO regulation as the fix. Sure, commercial food needs oversight. But if you're feeding as nature intended, your base diet was never going to come from a bag in the first place. We can't get there commercially, not with how the pet food industry is built right now.

Food is the entry point. It was never the whole story.

Here's what I actually mean by ReWilding, beyond the bowl: clean air (yes, that might mean a HEPA filter, because the air where a lot of us live is not doing our pets any favors), cleaner water, real food, light and circadian rhythm, and — the one nobody wants to hear — a regulated nervous system. Yours and theirs. You can feed the most correct diet on the planet, and if you're dysregulated, stressed, doom-scrolling, and disconnected from your own body, your dog feels it. That's not woo. That's the bond.

This isn't a rulebook. It isn't fear-based, and it isn't about perfection or a spreadsheet you have to hit 100% every day. It's a relationship. It's learning to trust what your gut tells you about your own animal, because every animal is an individual, and there's no single model that fits all of them equally.

What's changing on the podcast

A few shifts, straight from the mission:

More solo episodes and real case studies — anonymized, but pulled from actual work I do with actual dogs and cats, so you can see how the thinking actually applies instead of just hearing me talk about it in theory.

More curated guests, chosen for the mindset shift I think we actually need, not just because they have a platform. I'm still wrestling with how much I bring on guests I disagree with — there's value in that friction, but it's also my responsibility to protect what lands in your head, and I don't take that lightly.

More of me, in it, honestly. I'm not up at sunrise doing this perfectly. I'm still a night owl who emails clients at 2am. I bought a red light therapy device because I haven't figured out how to fix my own circadian rhythm yet. This is as much about me rebuilding as it is about helping you rebuild.

All I ask...

Go read Rewild Your Pet's Diet. I put a lot into it, and I mean it when I say I want your feedback — agree, disagree, tell me where it doesn't resonate. There's a six-month program if you want to work with me directly, but I'm not asking you to buy anything. I'm asking you to read it and tell me what you think.

Tell me what ReWilding means to you. Leave a voice memo at thepetparentingreset.com, DM me, email me — however you want to reach me, I'll actually read it. Give your pet some extra love from me, and I'll talk to you next week.

Listen to The Pet Parenting Reset podcast episode here.