Venison: the wild, lean protein behind our first topper

Venison is the main ingredient in our topper, VENISON + APPLE. Our venison comes from Nagano, where wild deer (ニホンジカ [nihonjika, Japanese sika deer]) live in large numbers.

Nagano alone is home to an estimated 220,000 wild deer. Each year, the prefecture sets a capture target of around 40,000 animals, managing the population to limit damage to its forests and farmland. The venison we use comes from that work: wild deer that grew up foraging on the mountainside. It is meat that comes from looking after Nagano's landscape.

A lean red meat, with iron

Wild venison is a lean red meat. According to Japan's food composition database, lean sika venison runs to roughly 24g of protein and about 4g of fat per 100g. It carries close to 3.9mg of iron per 100g, more than lean beef and several times that of chicken breast, alongside zinc and vitamin B12.

Venison is also often a novel protein, meaning one your dog has never eaten before. Dogs are usually raised on a narrow set of proteins: chicken, beef, lamb, fish. Venison sits outside that set, which is why it is sometimes used in veterinary elimination diets.

Deer, and only deer

The only animal ingredient in our recipe is deer: lean meat, heart and liver.

Heart is lean, worked muscle, closer in composition to red meat than to what most people picture when they hear organ meat. Liver is rich, so we use just a little. Together they taste deeper than red meat alone.

Organ meat in dog food is often a different animal from the one on the front of the pack. Ours is not. If a deer is taken to protect the forest, using as much of it as we can is the least we can do.

Taste and aroma

A topper only matters if your dog actually wants to eat it. Palatability was one of the things we cared about most in developing VENISON + APPLE.

Wild venison carries a deeper, more distinctive aroma than farmed meat: earthy, faintly mineral, unmistakably game. Heart and liver concentrate that. Dogs are often said to eat with their nose as much as their tongue, and we think that aroma is what makes our topper so tempting.

The meat itself is dense and close-grained, with a firmer bite than the softer, fattier cuts dogs get from most farmed meat.

From the forest to the bowl

There is value in knowing where food comes from.

Our venison comes only from deer taken alive at capture, in Nagano prefecture, and processed the same day at a Nagano-based processor. The meat is butchered using the same method used for venison prepared for people, and every animal is recorded: where it was taken, when, and by whom. The heart and liver come from the same processing, handled to the same standard as the meat.

That is why venison leads our first recipe. We wanted to tie your dog's bowl back to the work of keeping Nagano's forests standing. It is lean, it contains iron, and it is a protein many dogs have never met before. And it smells and tastes like something worth eating, which for a topper matters more than anything else.

A taste of Nagano's forests: VENISON + APPLE over your dog's usual meal.

A dog's meal deserves the same care we give our own. Caring about the taste and the story behind every ingredient is at the heart of how Karuizawa Harvest makes food.

Notes & sources

• Sika venison composition: 日本食品標準成分表2020年版(八訂), item 11275. MEXT Food Composition Database
• Nagano deer management (population and capture targets): 長野県 第6期ニホンジカ管理計画