A Small Dog

Discover your Dog’s Real Age

Posted on 10. Dec, 2008 by Jeff K. in Small Dog Care

You have heard it said that 1 year in a dog’s life is equivalent to 7 years in a human’s life. Not true. Dogs mature at rates that vary year by year, initially very quickly, then more slowly as the years pass. As a general rule, the first 8 months are puppyhood. Eight months to 3 years are adolescence, then comes adulthood, and finally old age, or senescence. As dogs approach the end of their lifespan, their fitness tends to deteriorate very rapidly. A dog’s breed influences its rate of aging. The largest dogs live out their lives in 7 to 9 years. Smaller dogs may live up to 18 years. Additionally disease, nutrition, and environmental risks all affect a dog’s rate of aging. Theoretically, according to biologists, a dog with no genetic predisposition to disease, could live 24 years.

With so many variables influencing a dog’s rate of aging, there must be some way to determine your dog’s true biological age. There is. Some years back there was a popular website called RealAge that everybody flocked to. The site attempted to determine your biological age by examining your lifestyle and habits. It adjusted your chronological age up or down based upon your answers to such survey questions as “Do you smoke and if so, how much per day?” and, “How often do you exercise.” Now there is a similar website for your dog called DogAge.

At DogAge, you can determine your dog’s biological age by answering a series of questions, not only about your dog’s habits, but your own habits as well. As we have said many times before, dogs are what we want them to be. It turns out, this adage applies not only to a dog’s behavior, but his health as well. How and when we feed our dogs, how we exercise with our dogs, even our attitude about our dog’s behavior all supposedly influence our dog’s overall health. At the end of the survey, not only will you learn your dog’s chronological age based on lifestyle, you will also get some follow-on recommendations based upon your survey answers. These recommendations are intended to help you improve your dog’s overall health.

Before you go to DogAge, a few caveats. The website will ask you for some personal information, such as your own age, that may be off-putting. Supposedly, the information you provide is kept secret for your eyes only. At one point, the survey asks you to match your dog’s appearance to one of about 40 photos of purebred dogs. I used one of my dogs, Kelsey, as the survey subject. She is a mixed-breed that does not look anything like any of the photos offered. I believe she is a Poodle-Schnauzer mix with more Schnauzer influence. So I picked the Schnauzer photo even though it looks nothing like her. There is also a commercial slant to the site that you can avoid with your initial choices on the survey.

As with any survey, the results you get depend not only on the truthfulness of your answers, but also on the bias of the people who put the survey together. When I tell my wife about some study I heard on TV or read in a magazine that claims a particular product is good for you, her favorite response is, “Really? Who paid for that study?” She has a point, so I’d advise not to take the results from the DogAge survey too seriously. Here is the link to DogAge. Have fun!

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