You may need to rethink your dog's age

[dalton99a]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2224268-convert-your-dogs-age-into-human-years-using-this-new-formula/

Convert your dog's age into human years using this new formula
21 November 2019
By Jake Buehler

You may need to rethink your dog’s age. Conventional wisdom says that one human year is the equivalent of seven dog years, but a new analysis suggests we have been getting this all wrong.

The seven dog years to every human year rule comes simply from crudely dividing human lifespan, around 80 years, by dog lifespan, typically 12 years. Trey Ideker at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues found that the rule is a little off.

The team performed a genetic analysis of dogs and humans to identify how they age over time. The researchers discovered that compared with humans, dogs age faster at first, blazing into the equivalent of human middle age after only a few years.

But this ageing quickly tapers off, with the next 10 years only accruing two human decades’ worth of changes. The team put this together into a single formula plotted in the graph below: human_age = 16 ln(dog_age) + 31. It is a significant revision to our understanding of how to map dogs against their human owners in terms of age, says Ideker.

[hlthe2b]

1. Graphic combines two of my most favorite things... Tom Hanks and Dogs! LOL

[targetpractice]

2. Where did the Tom Hanks vs Dog graphic come from?

I love it, but it's not in the article in your link.

[dalton99a]

3. From the original paper:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/11/04/829192.full.pdf
Quantitative translation of dog-to-human aging by conserved remodeling of epigenetic networks

[targetpractice]

6. Thank you, dalton99a! n/t

[Bayard]

4. Fascinating

That would make our 3 Pyr's in their 60's, and the mini-doxie is off the the chart.

[mr_lebowski]

5. Science, useless trivia, and Doggos ... 3 of my favorite things :) How about doing Kittehs next? nt

[emmaverybo]

7. What does In mean? I read the study, but still can't do the math. My two dogs are around 10 years

old. I know they are seniors. In traditional projections, which I assumed are based on stats, different breeds have different max lifespans. Most of us then go by what breed seems dominant in our dogs, which of course is unscientific. Littler dogs tend to have longer lifespans.

Boo hoo, unfair that dogs don’t have the actual human lifespan.

[mopinko]

12. their only flaw.

[cstanleytech]

15. "Boo hoo, unfair that dogs don't have the actual human lifespan." Considering the size and number

of litters they can produce adding a longer lifespan on top of that might not exactly be a good thing.

[emmaverybo]

16. Mandatory spay and neuter programs could work, if enforced. Then we would have to find them .

homes, which could be done if municipal animal care and control had the resources and used them. But they never will have such life-spans. No kill shelter proponents make the case that there are enough homes, but many of the shelters don’t market, don’t bother to find owners, don’5 do enough to not kill. Now parrots do have our lifespan and longer. That’s a problem for guardians! They have to be sure they have a plan for the birds they will leave behind.

I guess we’d need to control human population to accommodate longer-living dogs. I don’t have a problem with that.

[cstanleytech]

17. Long term probably would not work as there bound to be some animals that escape into

the wild before they were rendered sterile and once they managed to breed with wild canines you could have a potential problem.

[emmaverybo]

19. Well, there it is. I am in the science group I see! And you are talking truth to sentiment. We could

never, especially world wide, control their population, or care for all, so if they had longer lives, more would live horrible lives for more time. Facts of life.

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. It's a lower case L, not a capital i - "ln" the natural logarithm

If you have a scientific calculator, it should have an 'ln' button; but you can use Google as that. Just type, for instance, "=16*ln(10)+31" into the Google search box, and it gives you the human equivalent of 10 as 68.

I'm not convinced this works for old dog ages; the record for a dog is 29 and a half, which translates to only 85.

[emmaverybo]

22. Thank you so much! I am amazed a dog lived that long. And right, sounds like the algorithm

needs a tune up. My dogs are just a bit younger than I am. They look great for their age. You taught me something, neat.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. I've long known that the seven dog years equals one human year

is highly inaccurate. Plus, typical lifespans vary enormously depending on the breed.

[Harker]

9. And whether or not one smokes.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

13. LOL!

My brother is involved in Irish Wolfhound rescue, and not only does he get them already well past puppyhood, but they tend to live 9 years or less. Usually less.

Among the several reasons I like cats is that they tend to live longer.

But all of our four-legged friends are precious.

[Harker]

14. They certainly are precious...

the candle that burns twice as brightly burns half as long, it seems.

[Wednesdays]

10. My formula was always

the first year of the dog's life = 15 human years, then five human years for each year after that. This graph is even steeper than that. 🤔

[Martin Eden]

11. Our yellow lab Hunny passed away several years ago, a few months shy of 17

Looks like she was off the chart.

[SCantiGOP]

20. Oldest dog I ever knew

When I was a kid, an aunt had a chihuahua who made it to 22.
She actually recorded pets arrivals and deaths in her Bible.

[Rhiannon12866]

18. I also think age depends on the dog's size/breed. Two of my dogs lived past 18

But they were not large dogs, a Cairn Terrier and a Cocker Spaniel.