My Dog and Āyurveda

For most of my time practicing Āyurveda, my focus was naturally on people. Then I got Jenna.

Jenna is my now eight-year-old German Shepherd, and thankfully she is thriving. Something her vet comments on each year. It was precisely because I wanted to keep her that way that I became increasingly aware of the ecosystem of health issues that comes with having a large-breed dog.

With German Shepherds, you dread hip and joint issues that may be lying and waiting to rear their ugly heads. You start paying attention to the slightest itch when it seems allergens are everywhere. You become much more interested in digestion, because your dog eats everything off the street - resulting in 2 am diarrhea runs.

And then there is aging. I asked myself what I could do now that will make a difference to Jenna at 10 years, 12 years, and beyond.

The more aware I became of these things, the more I realized I didn't want to wait for a problem to start. I wanted to understand what I could do for better prevention and how to manage issues once they appeared.

Food became part of that thinking too. Jenna doesn't eat kibble. I prepare her food at home, and over time I've found that feeding a large dog this way doesn't have to be prohibitively expensive or turn into a second job. In fact, it costs less than premium kibble. It's both economical and practical. More importantly, it creates a very different relationship with what she eats and how she responds to it.

At some point it occurred to me that this was already how I thought about health every day.

Āyurveda had taught me to look at the person rather than simply the disease, to think about digestion, metabolism, tissues, age, diet, activity, environment, and season as interconnected factors. So I began wondering what would happen if I brought that same way of thinking to my dog. And eventually to others' dogs.

Not by treating a dog as a human—she obviously isn't—but by asking a more fundamental question: if Āyurveda is describing how living organisms maintain health within their environment, how much of that understanding extends beyond humans?

That question gradually became a natural evolution of what had previously been a very human-centric Ayurvedic practice for me. I started looking much more closely at canine physiology and nutrition alongside the classical principles I already knew, trying to understand where they genuinely intersected, where they didn't, and what might actually be useful.

Eventually, that exploration became Ayourpets®.

But it really began much more simply. I had a dog I loved who was healthy, and I wanted to understand how I could help keep her that way, not through some impossibly complicated wellness routine, but through things that were part of everyday life.

As a result, Jenna has taught me quite a lot about Āyurveda and given me a reason to bring her to work every day.