What Is in the Bowl? Diet, Serotonin and Behaviour in Dogs

When a dog's behaviour is causing real distress at home, the bowl is one of the first places I look, because the form a food takes has a dramatic influence on mood, feelings and actions, which is behaviour itself. This piece follows a single line of thought from one case, through the design of the canine gut and the chemistry of the brain, to what a good chew can do for a dog under stress.

Blue and the very hungry dog

Blue was a two year old Staffordshire Bull Terrier, neutered at eight months, and his owners rang me tearful and at odds with one another because the vet had suggested putting him to sleep, so before anything else I wanted to know what he was eating, since a very hungry dog who wolfs his food, scavenges whatever he can and drinks to excess on an expensive dry kibble is telling you something about what is going on inside him. Diet was my first port of call, because the form a food takes has a dramatic influence on mood, feelings and actions, which is behaviour itself, and you can read Blue's whole story in The Balanced Dog.

A very elegant piece of design

The stomach of a dog is lined with wrinkly little folds called rugae, which allow it to stretch around large quantities of high moisture meat and bone, grind them up and release acid only as it is needed, and when a dog is fed this way the gut stays acidic enough to be inhospitable to the harmful bacteria while the friendly ones flourish and crowd them out. Kibble is cooked, dry and compact, so it takes up comparatively little room, the stomach never fills and stretches as it was designed to, the rugae never get their chance to do their thing, and a gut with so little to do becomes flaccid and lazy and begins to present as sensitive, which is a rather poor return on a very elegant piece of design.

Tryptophan has to queue

Owners who feed an expensive, high protein kibble tend to do so with some confidence, as though the price and the protein percentage settled the matter, but from a behaviour perspective the brain makes its own serotonin from an amino acid called tryptophan, and tryptophan has to queue for entry alongside the other large amino acids that a high protein diet delivers in quantity, so it can be shoved aside in the crush. Plenty of dogs cope perfectly well on these diets, though in those already anxious, reactive or impulsive a very high protein, heavily processed food may contribute to dysregulation, and the question worth asking is less how much protein is in the bowl than what that protein is doing to neurotransmitter balance once it has been absorbed.

Serotonin and the evenings drawing in

Blue's family told me that his aggression had begun in the evenings only, crept into the daytime as time went on and become unmanageable by October, which is no great surprise to me, since melatonin is made from serotonin to send a dog off to sleep as the sun goes down, and a dog with only a tiny reserve of serotonin has to sacrifice some of it each evening just to switch off, leaving even less to keep his mood balanced at the very time we are asking him to settle down. It is no small coincidence that dominance aggression and idiopathic aggression are both described as more problematic at night, and with the evenings drawing in, it is a good moment to look at what is going into the bowl.

What bones can do, and the risks

Chewing bones boosts endorphin production through the mechanical action of the jaw, and bones also supply the minerals that support a stressed dog, bioavailable magnesium being a key player, but there are risks to feeding raw and I would not want anyone told otherwise, among them an unbalanced diet that can take a dog a long time to show a deficiency from, bones too dense for the dog in question that can fracture teeth, and cooked bones, which are very dangerous. Freshness, variety and a little homework go a long way, and the complete ready to feed raw meals that arrive frozen and balanced are a good place to start if the ratios are what put you off, because your dog not only needs to understand what you want, he needs to be capable of doing it.

You can read Blue's whole story, and much more on how food, health and behaviour fit together, in The Balanced Dog, available on Amazon UK.

Julia Langlands, Canine Behaviour Specialist (ACFBA) | Balance Behaviour. Expert holistic behaviour advice, complex cases, second opinions, insurance claims accepted. Call or message 07920 464120.