Why your dog isn't the age you think 

They aren’t measuring age, they’re measuring the rate of development.

Couple of things to note here: First of all, this study was done specifically on Labradors, so you can't assume it's true for ALL dog breeds, especially ones that are quite significantly different, like a Chihuahua. Secondly, this is done by measuring the amount of methyl groups on the DNA at certain ages. Methyl groups are added by a process conveniently called methylation. Methylation is an important process that helps DNA carry out it's many important functions and with age the quantity of methyl groups decreases.

Not age, but maturity. Dogs reach their maturity ceiling much faster comparatively to humans.

Can confirm. My 2 year old dog has a bad back, watches golf every Sunday, and constantly asks about the weather and mail.

i’m gonna have to ignore this because there’s no way i can justify a 30yo pissing on the couch. she’s simply a baby, your honor

The researchers are clearly incorrect. My dog is 11 and she's still my baby.

They mature faster, we die faster.

The dogs size also matters for that. The smaller the dog the less it ages generally.

Always thought it was really cool how puppies and kittens developed so quickly. Makes sense they're equivalent to a full grown human by the time they're just one

Ain’t no way that a 30 year old be living rent free in my house

There's nothing that you can say to convince me that a 1-year-old dog is the equivalent relative age of a 30-year-old human being.

Dogs after 1 year: im older than you now

They don’t age faster, they just mature faster

I think a crucial point everyone is missing here is that every dog’s lifespan is different, making them different “human ages” depending on their breed. A Great Dane at 7 years old would be geriatric, while a Chihuahua at 7 years old is still a middle-aged adult

Imagine seing a 1 year old dog all healthy & full of energy and thinking "that's like me at 30"... Like, wdym??? My back's killing me and I'm 25!!

I think the first method is just the average lifespan of a dog divided by the average lifespan of a human, which is roughly 7.

It's not age, it's maturity. Why do people not understand. Dogs do not age faster, they *mature* faster.

“We age slower while we’re young, faster while we’re old.” I felt that in my core.

I straight up do not believe a 1 year old dog is equivalent to 30 year old human

All I want is for my dog to live a healthy life until one day before I die. That’s literally all I want in my life

Every single animal on this planet ages quickest between birth and sexual maturity. Time is literally a social construct, so a dog that is 5 years old is genuinely a dog at 5 years old.

It's all about muzzle greying. If they have no grey around the muzzle, they're a puppy; if the have grey around the muzzle they are still a puppy

I think they quantify it by certain milestones for example when their bones get their final structure, when they acquire capacity of being able to reproduce, get to their final size (humans usually stop growing at 19-21 i think). Alongside that, I'm sure they track hormones, proteins and another compound's production

It's important to remember that this is a relative age thing. The reality of the situation is that dogs's lifespan just can't be compared to a human lifespan. The are fertile before they are 1, they are mature at 1 or 2, and they usually die around 12-15. Their lifespan just can't really be compared properly to ours

Loving the small sound design additions on your videos lately.

I was given the best birthday card from a friend on my last birthday, it just said "In dog years, you're dead" 😂

Also larger dogs will age differently than smaller dogs, there's a lot of factors for many different breeds. It's pretty interesting really.

Multiply by seven is the quick math version of ignoring dog puberty and the plateau. It still (roughly) checks out

Age is based on mental and physical development. Most animals develop very quickly as babies because In the wild they would otherwise die. Humans on the other hand are born not able to walk or speak or hold their own head. They develop much slower.

It doesn’t matter how old the dog physically is, they are all cute babies lol

"And that's relativity" ~Albert Einstein

Reproductive maturity, digestive/organ health, cellular regeneration, cognitive function. What’s wild is the variance of “aging” these four exhibit in a dog’s life.

Essentially, they’re measuring sexual maturity and when the animal stops growing

Clearly a one year old dog is smarter and more self sufficient than a one year old human

My dog is 12 and she is still my enjoyment and (for some reason) she is soooooo energetic (sometimes)

Do most animals have an age curve similar to a dog’s, and relatively few have one similar to a humans? For example, whales, elephants, apes, other intelligent animals with complex social structures stay with their mothers longer and take more time growing up, so they have more time to develop their brains. Something like a lizard or snake just pops out of the egg and has to start adulting right away, they don’t have a developmental stage involving play at all. Their curve is probably even more drastic than the dog’s. I’d love to see a graph like this with a bunch of animals on it.

You also need to look at different breeds, as they have higher or lower average max age. There are calculator to calculate the dogs age by size / breed. Many smaller breeds get older than the big dogs and they are very active to a higher age.

If I remember correctly they used several different indices, some physical and some mental. Another interesting fact is they found that smaller dogs seemed to have a flatter curve, which is why the lived longer, where as large dogs had a more inclined curve and shorter lives. It came down to growth hormones that switched off more in small dogs and stayed on longer or never really shut off for the large dogs. I think humans are the outlier on development, which is why it takes so long for us even to walk where all other animals can do it within minuets or at most days.

My dog is 20. Literally off the charts.

Bro my one year old dog still can’t stop peeing in the house💀

They check the genome, DNA has a buffer that gets slowly stripped away every time cells divide. Ageing is when that buffer runs out and to produce new cells through dividing you’d start cutting into that cells function.

My vet showed me a chart that went by a dog size to determine its age, the larger, the dog, the older in terms of years

David Sinclair has great research on epigenetics of aging. Maybe that’ll be a good Huge topic

I remember the best way to quantify and identity aging is by checking the ability to the cells to retain the necessary dna from replication. That's the main reason i think

It’s not about the aging, it’s about the lifespan. Humans are just trying to relate how long their dogs have lived to something that is easier for them to see. Hope that helps!

Moral of the story: age is just a number.

Bryan Johnson enters chat

My husky is almost 17. No one’s talking about how hard it is to see your dog aging, especially when they get old. I wish dogs aged like humans.

You're a brilliant mind and a brilliant role model. I wish there were more women like you in the world.

Small correction: this doesn't imply dogs age slower when they're old than humans do. You can infer "slower" and "faster" by the slope of the graph. Slope > 1 implies dogs age faster, and Slope < 1 implies humans age faster. Since the graph always has a slope > 1, a dog at 14 will age faster than a human at 70. The correct inference would be dogs always age faster than humans but get closer to the human rate of ageing as they get older :)

So my dog was 70? Damn my boy must have lived a good life

Makes sense why dogs look so young still at older ages

It also differs between breeds. They probably assess the condition of their vital functions, their organs etc + their social skills etc.

The Waffle house has found it's new host.

That 7 figure was obtained by dividing the average human live by the average dog life. You get about 7 if you do this. That’s all that figure means, nobody was using it as an actual age measurement

Boy she’s beautiful!

Seems like the multiply by 7 thing works pretty well as a general guide when you want to ball park it.

They estimate it with maturity

Humans reach full growth later due to neoteny. This is true so that our bigger and bigger brains can pass through the birth canal without getting stuck. Stephen Jay Gould explains this in one of his books

It also makes a lot of sense in terms of mental age. Humans take a while to reach full mental maturity but dogs do it extremely quickly in comparison.

The reason people say it's 7 is because the average lifespan of a human is roughly 7 times as long as that of a dog

The humans graph scared the shit out of meeeeee😢😭😭😭😭

My dog is 11 and he’s been acting the same for around 6 years, so this totally checks out.

here's the thing. My dog is currently 8, and she hasn't aged (aka changed)one bit (minus a few white whiskers) since she was a puppy. She's still the same beautiful, fit looking, the happiest ever and the most playful little shit I've ever seen

Aint no way my dog be 57 and still leaping around and running in circles

If i come to your house and you tell me your dog is 60 years in "dog years" im never coming back.

Also one of the longest lived dogs got to 28 was called Bramble and was a vegetarian. There was a book called the dog that refused to dog written by their owner.

I believe it also varies by breed of dog. Many smaller dog breeds tend to have longer life spans than most larger breeds dogs.

The dog years are 7 human years just means how much of their lifespan correlates to ours. People got weird and started tinking it meant dogs had the same maturity as people that age.

It make sense for animal who evolve to survive. You reach full strength of maturity faster and retain that for longer.

This is obvious if you've ever had a pair of mourning doves nest in a flower pot you've set outside and the plant died. I know, I took pictures every day before going to work. The whole process takes a little over two weeks because it's about two weeks when both mom & dad are off the nest and bringing back food to the developing newborns. They took flight but hung around for another two weeks for parental instruction then disappeared. So in human terms it's about two weeks from bearing feathers to driving a car and another two weeks to being an adult on your own. We left the nest and it happened for years until we left. I don't know if it was a different pair every year but after the first year they were always comfortable with us going out on the patio and even grilling. They make very cordial neighbors and I make sure to go quite some distance on my uplands game hunting.

There's a difference between dexterity and maturity too.

50 year olds shouldn’t be shitting on the rug

I found this out a couple years ago, yet your explanation with the curve diagram is the first time I've seen how we age compared to dogs. My 14 year old dog just got 20 years younger 😁

Geneticists also have to take into account different breeds as well. Large breeds with a lifespan of 7 to 9 years age differently from smaller breeds with lifespans 12 to 15+ years.

Makes sense. They reach maturity quick then chill like that a while. It’d be like if a human was 20 after a year, and then slowly age the rest of the way.

As far as i knew, the comparison was just life span, not maturity

"More in next video!" Me seeing the comments: damn, 9 months💀

Omg I just realized this. Thats the perception of age. When you turned the chart it reminded me of how we perceive time as we age. Thats why time flies as we get older. We aren’t receiving as new stimuli as often as when were younger. This just hit me like a truck and maybe other people already realized this and I’m lagging behind but still.

Most ruminant mammals (horses, deer, calves, lambs, elands, giraffes, etc.) can stand minutes after they are born. And while predatory mammals den, they still stand and are self-sufficient far sooner than we do.

A small dog matures faster than a big dog (big dogs are puppies for longer), so you can't even rely on a single line like this. Additionally, like a lot of other comments are talking about, comparing a human age to a dog age is pretty useless as a metric. It can be helpful if you're thinking of it in terms of health as it relates to age, like, a senior dog is 10+, so we think of that as being equivalent to 65+. But if you're properly taking care of your dog and they have no serious health problems, they can be active well into their "senior" years, unlike humans, whose joints, bones, muscles, etc get worn out (because 65 years of wear and tear on a body does not equal those 10 years of wear and tear). It's just not a comparable thing.

If it was geneticists who did this study they most likely measured telomeres which essentially is extra genetic material meant specifically to slow aging at the end of life, but we lose some telomeres each time our cells go through reproduction

It's not that they're aging fast when they're young.but we're aging slow when we're young

Yes I can confirm this since my parents work in the vet industry, but it also depends on the size and breed or dog because small dogs will live longer than big dogs

It's cellular development measured against cellular breakdown.

I think it’s more about just giving people some tools to help them understand why that part of their family passed away at such a young age. We normalise the question of “aww how old was she when she passed?” “She was 15” “Awh she had a full life!” Probably supported by the fact we don’t have like Fruit Fly years. Where 1 day = 7 years. As we don’t connect to those emotionally like we do with Dogs / Cats and other domesticated animals so we don’t need the softening of the blow / closure.

It actually makes sense that it wouldn't be a straight line like that if you think about it same way humans kind of regress at an older age

The 7 rule is because humans maximum age is around 100 Dogs depending on size and breed is 14 or 15 100 divided by 7 is 14.28. So that’s the ratio between human life span and dog life span. So it’s is actually a really good tool back by “rEaL sCiENcE”. Your doesn’t necessarily equal the rate of aging. Not that not the question it’s answering. Its answering lifespan

So if I time it just right, me and a dog can grow old together 😂

The real answer is who cares because dogs are not people, and people who think dogs are people should get a therapist

Cell regeneration speed Cell rejuvenation capability Cell quality degradation I believe they also take into account the specimen's metabolism

I mean it makes sense dogs are still very active throughout their life so it would make sense for them to be able to hunt at older ages unlike humans who rarely need to hunt for food

When the video started I thought it was Steven Tyler

We both age at the same rate. Our brains develop at a different rate

Your age curve seems to be a straight line 😊

You can quantify aging by age of learning capacities; food independency, ability to defend itself, capability of reproduction, first diseases and body pains...etc

I would be very interested to see a chart where we say that the x axis goes from age 0 to average death age (probably as a percentage) and maybe beyond and the y axis is something like development or something. That way you can see when different animals develop in perspective of eachother in there life cycle.

One dog is 8, the other is 6. They both act like they’re still puppies

I’ve also heard that dogs age at a speed depending on their size. So like if they’re small they age slower than bigger dogs. At least that’s what a chart at a vets office told me

Love your videos. They are amazing