Venison: the wild, lean protein behind our first meal topper

Venison is the first ingredient in our meal 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, aiming to bring the population back to a level its forests and farmland can sustain. The venison we use is a byproduct of that work: wild animals, foraging on the mountain, taken as part of managing the same landscape our food is named after. It is meat that comes from looking after the land.

A lean red meat

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 a novel protein, meaning one that most dogs have never eaten. Dogs are usually raised on a narrow set of proteins: chicken, beef, lamb, fish. Venison sits outside that set, which is why it appears often on veterinary elimination diets.

Deer, and only deer

Our recipe uses only deer meat: shoulder muscle, 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 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 more of it is the least we can do.

Food worth eating

A meal topper only enriches your dog’s life if they actually want 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 eat with their nose as much as their tongue, and that aroma is what makes our meal topper enticing.
The meat itself is dense and close-grained, with a firmer bite than the softer, fattier cuts dogs get from most farmed meat.

Traceable from the forest

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. It ties a bowl of dog food back to the work of keeping Nagano's forests standing. It is lean and iron-rich, a protein most dogs have never met before. And it smells and tastes like something worth eating, which for a meal topper matters as much as anything else.

A taste of VENISON + APPLE over your dog's usual meal is a taste of the forest.

Karuizawa Harvest makes whole-food meal toppers for dogs. We’re based in Karuizawa, Nagano. 

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 cull figures): 長野県 第6期ニホンジカ管理計画