Hannah Zulueta Two Wood Dogs, Opposite Diets
The excess versus deficiency distinction the wellness world skips.
Something delights me every time I watch it happen now. A committed raw feeder, or a home cook who has not strayed from the stove in three years, explaining to someone newer why their dog needs cooling proteins.
They use words like thermal nature. They talk about the liver. They are completely right and they are completely confident, and ten years ago they would have looked at me like I had two heads if I had said any of it.
Traditional Chinese Medicine has gone mainstream. Dr. Judy Morgan’s Yin and Yang books helped open that door. Dr. Marsden’s Gold Standard Herbs followed. Now there are commercial dog food lines organized by element. Entire communities are having these conversations without prompting.
It fills me with genuine joy.
But here is what most of those conversations stop short of.
A Wood dog is not simply a bossy dog who needs cooling proteins. That dog may be full, or it may be empty.
The same element presents in radically different bodies. And the body changes what the tool does.
I have been in formal TCM training for the past several years. Not by a short path. I tried to attend Chi University and found quickly that their program is post-graduate work for veterinarians only. A holistic vet I respect, Dr. Dennis Thomas, suggested I consider acupuncture school instead. “Same same but different,” he said.
I found a school nine miles from my house. Toured on a Tuesday. Enrolled by Friday.
That was four years ago, and at that time I was 49. I was in perimenopause with a capital P, which I will tell you is worse than puberty run in reverse. I had no good reason to do it and every good reason to do it. I told my beloved I would go and see if it made me a better nutritionist.
By the second day of my first Fundamentals class, I knew I was not leaving.
TCM is not a set of tools. It is a way of seeing. You cannot learn it in pieces.
I signed into student loan territory and committed to a doctorate. In California, graduates qualify to serve as a patient’s primary care physician. We take the same foundational coursework as medical students before going into our specialty. By the time I graduate I will have seen at least 350 patients in clinic.
I say this not to credential myself, but to say: what I learned in that school is not what circulates in the wellness dog food world. Only the people trained formally in this medicine can really speak on it. Reading up on TCM on Instagram, or off the back of a tea tag, gives you the words. It does not give you the seeing, and the seeing is what the training is for.
Before school, I thought TCM was one unified system. It is not. TCM is the common language. Underneath it are lineages, each with its own lens, its own emphasis, its own clinical logic.
The lineage I am working most closely with now is Japanese Meridian Therapy. The orientation is direct: what is the state of Qi, Blood, and Fluids in this body? Where is there excess heat or cold? What needs to be brought into balance?
That question, when applied to the Wood Element, produces something far more useful than the standard advice to feed a cooling diet to a Wood dog.
If you have been in TCM circles for any amount of time, you know the Wood Element.
In the animal world, this often gets translated into a personality profile: the bossy, confident, directive dog is a Wood type, so feed accordingly.
In clinic, we go further. We are trained to evaluate from the first moment we see a patient. I joke with classmates that this skill feels like the Bene Gesserit in Dune: seeing things others walk past. It is not mysticism. It is trained pattern recognition built over years.
For the Wood type, the first thing we notice is the eyes. They are either very large or very small, and they have a quality. A quality of being in charge. Of not being moved easily. Models often have this characteristic: eyes that seem to see through you. Time magazine covers are full of them. The liver blooms in the eyes in TCM, and once you know what you are looking at, you cannot unsee it.
The classical description of the liver’s role used the military as its metaphor. The liver is the General. Strategic. Decisive. Getting things done. Today you see Wood types running companies, building movements, solving problems faster than anyone in the room.
But the wellness conversation almost always stops at the personality sketch. It misses the single most important clinical distinction in Wood Element work.
There are Wood types who have an abundance of Blood. In TCM, the liver is where blood is stored, and this function is most active between 1 and 3 AM. When a patient tells me they wake consistently in that window, I note it. The liver meridian warrants attention.
Liver Excess types are defined by fullness. They have a lot of blood, which means they have a lot of drive, a lot of resilience, and a lot of heat to burn.
Think of Mick Jagger. If you look at early photographs, the eyes are extraordinary: large, direct, full of a particular kind of charge. The stories about his constitution are consistent with the pattern. He could perform, stay up until 5 AM, sleep two hours, get up and run. That is not discipline alone. That is a body with resources to burn.
Liver Excess types as children are the ones who physically cannot sit still. Time-outs are a form of torture for them. They become athletes. They heal faster than their peers. They break a leg and are back on the field before the medical staff expects it, because blood rushes to injury in these bodies and does its work quickly.
What they need is movement. Sustained, consistent, demanding movement. If they do not get it, blood pools. We call this Blood Stasis in TCM. We can feel it in the pulse. We can find it in the body. Left unaddressed over years, Stasis becomes the ground from which more serious presentations develop: cardiovascular events, or cancer.
These bodies are also the ones that sometimes reach for substances that move them when they are not getting enough movement otherwise. That is a pattern, not a judgment. The body is trying to solve its own problem by a different route.
The difficulty with Liver Excess types is that they show up for treatment late. They feel so strong for so long that by the time they come through the door, there is significant work to do. And because they are constitutionally resilient, their diet and herbal formulas tend to be forgiving. Get something slightly wrong and the body absorbs it without complaint. That tolerance is a gift, and it is also the reason they do not catch the pattern early.
In dogs, I have seen this type only a handful of times. The stories owners tell are remarkable. My dog ate an entire bag of kibble, vomited, and was back to normal the next morning. My dog was badly bitten at the park and was healed before the week was out. These are the superhero dogs. Almost unbreakable, and they do not know their limits because they have rarely found them.
Maggie is this dog. She is Mr. Higgins’ sibling and his opposite in almost every way. As a puppy she was the one always in motion, always pushing, always the first one into everything. Mr. Higgins hung back. Quiet. Watchful. Even then, the constitutions were visible if you knew what you were looking for.
Now Maggie is the dog who bounces out of bed at 5 AM with her dog dad, ready to go before the rest of the house has stirred. Ten miles of hiking is a good start for her. She recovers like nothing happened. She could eat twice what Mr. Higgins can, or tolerate a formula that would not suit him at all, and her system would process it without complaint.
Liver Deficiency types may have started as Excess. Many of them did. They burned through their resources, and over time the fullness became depletion.
I am this type.
I spent twenty years climbing from a call center to VP of Operations, Sales, and Marketing. I ran marathons. I traveled constantly. I kept an active social life. I was proud of being able to start at 6 AM and go until 10 PM. I did not know I was spending from a reserve that does not automatically refill.
Looking back through the lens I have now, the tells were everywhere. Liver Deficient types are often exceptionally good at managing themselves. This looks like discipline. It is actually survival. Before apps existed, I logged everything I ate on a spreadsheet. I kept a strict schedule. I managed my calendar with precision and did not handle deviations well. I understood this as productivity. Now I understand it as a body that knew exactly how much it had and could not afford to waste it.
Blood is the resource. Liver Deficient types have less of it, and when it is spent, the body is not quiet about it. I had irregular cycles. I would feel faint after my monthly bleed and take iron just to function. My thumbnails carry ridges, the kind associated with the liver in TCM. I run dry. I am easily irritated by friction and have learned over decades to remove it from my environment. I used to think this was good cultivation. It is partly that. It is also a constitutional response: these bodies cannot afford to bleed their resources into other people’s chaos. Liver Deficient types are highly sensitive and know how to take care of themselves, and they make excellent healers.
The treatments for Liver Deficiency are nourishing by nature. We are building up the body, not overly moving. Gentle movement, not intense output. Rest that is real rest, not collapse.
Where a Liver Excess body will tolerate dietary error and shake it off, a Liver Deficient body will tell you immediately when something is wrong. Get the food or formula wrong and you will hear about it. The system does not have excess to buffer the mistake.
Mr. Higgins is this dog. He was the runt of the litter, and I was drawn to him for exactly that reason. He was the quiet one. The one who hung back while his sibling careened through the whelping box. I understand now that I recognized something in him before I had the language for it.
At one of his exams, his liver values came back off. I asked for an ultrasound, preparing myself for the worst, and the vet told me his liver was simply smaller than average. He is constitutionally a liver blood deficiency dog, and everything about how I manage him reflects that.
I learned this partly by getting it wrong. I fed him raw pheasant neck once, before I understood what I was working with. He woke me at 2 AM to eject it from his body completely. His system could not process it. The food was not wrong. The container just wasn’t a match for it.
He is my show dog. We travel for dog shows and I have to plan our days with intention. Too many stimulating hours and I can see the cost on him the next day. He needs recovery built into his schedule the way an athlete in the deficiency phase of training does.
He also goes wild for chicken. Chicken has yang energy in TCM. It moves. A Liver Deficient body that runs cool reaches for what warms and moves it. His body knows what it loves and I follow the lead.
He does not do well with excess fiber. Blueberries are a snack staple in my house. They are sour, which benefits the liver. They build blood, which I need and which he benefits from in careful proportion. He gets three to five. That is enough. Maggie could eat twice the amount without a second thought.
The blueberry is not the question. The body the blueberry is going into is the question.
The good news for Mr. Higgins is that he got a Liver Deficient dog mom. I watch him the way I watch myself: with the particular attention of someone who knows exactly what this constitution requires. He is healthy. He is happy. He has a good life. And none of that is accidental.
Same Wood Element. Opposite constitutions. Flip between them.
TCM went mainstream because the framework is true and teachable. The Five Elements give you a real map. Thermal nature, organ system correspondences, the sour taste supporting the liver: these are ways to guide you through interpretation and life decisions.
What did not make it into the mainstream conversation is the layer underneath: the same element presents in radically different bodies, and the body changes what the tool does.
A Wood dog is not simply a bossy dog who needs cooling proteins. That Wood dog may be full or empty. It may be overflowing with blood and needing movement more than anything else, or it may be running on a smaller tank and needing every resource carefully stewarded.
The people I watch with joy now, the ones explaining thermal nature in dog parks and Facebook groups, are doing something real. They learned one true thing, and it changed how they see their dogs. Kudos to all of you who advocate for TCM.
The next layer is asking: excess or deficient? Full or empty? What does this specific body need, not what does the element suggest? When I see dog owners start asking that question, I will know the teaching has gone somewhere it has not reached yet. That is the conversation I am in it for.
Feed the dog in front of you. Not the archetype.
Hannah Zulueta obtained her Certificate in Canine Nutrition from CASI Institute. She is also studying for her Doctorate in Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Herbalism from the esteemed Pacific College of Health and Medicine. If you’re as keenly interested in health for yourself, visit her website for human health: Satori Acupuncture and Herbs.
She resides in San Diego with her three dogs, Maggie, Orbit, and Mr. Higgins.
She is available for one on one consultations. She develops evidence-based recipes that meet both NRC and AAFCO nutritional standards while integrating the therapeutic food principles of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine into her formulations.
Additionally, you can find her sharing free content on Instagram.
