Kemosabe: Bison Meat for Breakfast

As a canine living with a whole food nutritionist, I’m fortunate to get a variety of foods to eat: raw, cooked, sometimes a mixture of both, with assorted vegetables and fruits in Buckaroo’s Stews. Luckily, none of us in the Aussie Tribe are food sensitive or have particularly delicate GI tracts. Hellooo, bison meat!

My favorite meal of all, however, is Raw bison meat is my favorite meal of all. That’s the most delicious food on the planet, and according to my human, one of the best foods for dogs.

Bison are always free-ranged because they don’t fit in most barns, and get grumpy and aggressive if humans try to make them behave like cows. Bison eat a wider range of grasses than cattle, and can live 20-25 years.

Bison meat is lower in fat than beef, pork, or chicken. Bison meat has 2.42 grams of fat per 100 grams, while beef has 9.28 grams, pork contains 9.21 grams and chicken provides 7.41 grams. This is important for dogs that have spreading waistlines and those of us who want to maintain a healthy weight but still want to eat great food.

Ground bison provides 22 grams of protein per 3 ounces. This is four times what an egg provides and 1 gram more than ground beef.

Bison also provides as many omega 3’s per serving as salmon, and 3-6 times the amount of omega 3’s as grain fed animals. Bison meat is also one of the richest sources of CoQ10, which is required by cells to produce energy and help protect the body from free radical damage.

Bison are not injected with growth hormones, antibiotics or other drugs and chemicals, for several reasons. For one, bison are cranky and don’t like to be messed with. Secondly, the National Bison Association passed a resolution opposing the use of these substances in the production of bison for meat.

Ground bison can be found at Whole Foods Market and other health food grocery stores. You can cook it like hamburger, or feed it raw.   I like raw best, because it’s similar to eating live prey, like a squirrel I’ve caught, which I don’t often get to chew on ‘cause the humans take it away.

My human says that raw ground bison provides improved nutrient assimilation because the food enzymes are still alive, and haven’t been cooked out. Because our bodies can utilize raw meat so well, there is less poop for our human to pick up. But I like bison because it tastes great. Maybe it connects me back to my wolf ancestors who hunted and dined on bison. Maybe it reminds me of food that has a bit of ‘the wild’ in it, that connects me to the wild side of all canines.