human age = 16 ln(dog_age) + 31
July 2, 2020 4:59 PM   Subscribe

"Dogs do not simply age at seven times the rate of humans, scientists have found in a study that reveals young dogs might be “older” than previously thought"

The scientists were even able to work out a formula: human age = 16 ln(dog_age) + 31. Please note that this is for Labrador Retrievers only and more study is required for other breeds to work out their formulas.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm (28 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Less than 2 in Lab years sounds pretty good.
posted by nat at 5:24 PM on July 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


The findings suggest a one-year-old puppy is actually about 30 in “human years” – an age when humans, at least, might be expected to have stopped running riot with the toilet paper.

who are these so-called scientists trying to tell me how to live my life
posted by mhoye at 5:39 PM on July 2, 2020 [41 favorites]


Hmm, their formula breaks down for babies. A month- old dog would have negative human years...
posted by Maxwell's demon at 5:44 PM on July 2, 2020


"Prof Lucy Asher, an expert in canine puberty at Newcastle University"

Hold the phone, you can get a PhD studying puppies? Dr. Asher is living her best academic life.
posted by mhoye at 5:45 PM on July 2, 2020 [21 favorites]


More remarkably, dogs younger than about 52 days are actually, in human terms, not even yet born.
posted by Pyry at 5:45 PM on July 2, 2020 [5 favorites]


They say all dogs go to heaven, but having to live a subjective infinity of human years in the first moments of your life sounds like quite the opposite to me.
posted by Pyry at 5:47 PM on July 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


Do skim the paper; it's more interesting than just "Scientists just came up with some wacky equation for dog years." They claim to have come up with a way to correlate the rate of the aging process between different mammalian species. But it does seem like the researchers should have used a power law instead.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 6:08 PM on July 2, 2020 [3 favorites]


3 month old puppy told me the skylight was leaking bad. Rain was so loud I couldn't hear it. 3 year old boy was using it as a slipnslide.

What really impressed me was when same pup kept me from getting skewered. The whole reason I was using an ax was because I wont chainsaw alone but the vibrations from the blows loosened the dead dry top of the tree. Thought she was just being silly until she bit me. Went to put her in and suddenly a twelve foot spear was stuck in the ground where I'd been standing.

She'd been after me for 10-15 minutes. She predicted that. Blew me away.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 6:22 PM on July 2, 2020 [67 favorites]


please get more dogs, Mr. Yuck
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:30 PM on July 2, 2020 [34 favorites]


I am now picturing a team of dogs whose sole job is to follow Mr. Yuck around preventing imminent loss to limb and life
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 6:35 PM on July 2, 2020 [54 favorites]


3 month old puppy told me the skylight was leaking

This was a one year old dog, but I was house and dog sitting for a friend, and this happened: the dog comes upstairs and into my room at night, and is seemingly wanting something. I go along, with "what it is boy?" kind of attitude.

The dog gently takes my hand and pulls on it, in a "Timmy fell down a well" way. So I let the dog lead me, and he takes me down to the back door of the house, which I had left unlocked, and which was now open a few inches.

He wanted me to close and lock the door.
posted by StickyCarpet at 6:38 PM on July 2, 2020 [56 favorites]


Most people underutilize their poodles.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 6:41 PM on July 2, 2020 [12 favorites]


I don't know why you'd bother calculating the age of a creature who will never, ever, ever die.
posted by praemunire at 7:07 PM on July 2, 2020 [38 favorites]


But it does seem like the researchers should have used a power law instead.

Yeah, looking through the paper they don't seem to justify their choice of equation anywhere-- I would be interested to know if there is a plausible physiological mechanism that would result in log aging relative to a human (which would imply that we could create dog Methuselahs with modest advances in anti-aging compared to humans), or whether the equation was chosen by just eyeballing the scatter plot.

If I were to just BS some aging equation that fits that data, I'd guess like 'Age(t) = rt + c(1 - e^(-kt))', which both goes through zero and is asymptotically linear.
posted by Pyry at 7:42 PM on July 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


I have a 3 month old poodle pup. She's way worse than an infant. Infants can't walk around and chew on power cords. Nor have sharp, bitey teeth they need to try out.
posted by Windopaene at 7:43 PM on July 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


Interesting that the giant breeds aren't very long-lived; seven years is what I've heard for Irish Wolfhounds, and something similar for Great Danes, but I'm a little chary of quoting such things since I claimed some time ago here that there was a handful of Blue Heelers over 30, but then couldn't find any real confirmation online.
posted by jamjam at 10:32 PM on July 2, 2020


Here is an intriguing article correlating breed lifespans to age-normalized telomere lengths
Domestic dogs show parallels in telomere biology to humans, with similar telomere length, telomere attrition, and absence of somatic cell telomerase activity. Using this model, we find that peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) telomere length is a strong predictor of average life span among 15 different breeds (p < 0.0001), consistent with telomeres playing a role in life span determination. Dogs lose telomeric DNA ∼10-fold faster than humans, which is similar to the ratio of average life spans between these species. Breeds with shorter mean telomere lengths show an increased probability of death from cardiovascular disease, which was previously correlated with short telomere length in humans.
I'd never heard that dog telomeres shorten 10 times faster than humans'. If that reflects rates of cell division, no wonder they seem to be so hungry all the time.

Beagles have pride of place among the 15 breeds studied.
posted by jamjam at 11:06 PM on July 2, 2020


Six months from now, I will tell someone with absolute conviction that there are a handful of Blue Heelers over 30, without any idea where I learned the fact from.
posted by lostburner at 11:12 PM on July 2, 2020 [12 favorites]


I don’t know why I even looked at that. I already know painfully well the score with bulldogs. (Two are on the bed with me right now.) What can you do... they’re too lovable and the rescue keeps calling us with their odd cases.
posted by azpenguin at 11:13 PM on July 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


I happen to remember where I heard that Blue Heeler factoid, lostburner, although it took a couple of weeks for it to surface the first time around.

It was from a rural Washington 'hobby' Blue Heeler breeder who was selling old tools at the Fremont neighborhood Sunday flea market in Seattle 25 years ago, and had several of his lively and extremely charming dogs with him.
posted by jamjam at 11:34 PM on July 2, 2020 [3 favorites]


I haven’t been on Metafilter much so this may have already been posted, but this recent short article about the world’s oldest Golden Retriever seems relevant here. (I don’t know How to Math, so if anyone wants does can tell me what a 20 year old Golden is in human years using that equation, that would be great.)

One of my dogs is getting very old and stiff so I bawled when reading the article. He’s only 10 and is a medium dog, and when adopted at 7 he seemed so spry, but he was a street dog before we brought him home so all our efforts to stop the inevitable aging process didn’t get us very far. Gonna go lay down next to his bed now and be sad in advance thinking about losing him :(
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 9:11 AM on July 3, 2020 [2 favorites]


so if anyone wants does can tell me what a 20 year old Golden is in human years using that equation, that would be great
16*ln(20)+31 ~= 79 years, which strikes me as low. I should probably read the article in details, but in general this formula seems a little off outside of a very particular range (it's negative for the first two months, as is pointed up upthread). That logarithm is super powerful, and so things get crazy when the age gets large. A 200 year old dog is equivalent to 115 human years old by this formula.
posted by 3j0hn at 11:41 AM on July 3, 2020


So after about 52 and a half days, a dog reaches a human age of zero?
posted by yeolcoatl at 1:37 PM on July 3, 2020


@jamjam

Assuming this would also apply to cats, it might help explain why I've noticed my cat will have self-inflicted wounds from irritated scratching disappear exceedingly fast. A little while back, he scratched a nasty gouge into the opening of his right ear canal, and it only took a week to completely seal up and look almost the same as before. I was astonished!
posted by constantinescharity at 5:53 PM on July 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


I am going to assume this formula is perfectly accurate, because it makes me e in dog years.
posted by irrelephant at 9:04 PM on July 3, 2020 [2 favorites]


Good point, constantinescharity, it probably does apply to cats:
Measurements of daily energy expenditure indicate that primates, including humans, expend only half of the calories expected for mammals of similar body size. As energy expenditure is central to organismal biology, these results hold important implications for life history, evolutionary biology, and foraging ecology for primates and other mammals. Specifically, we show that primates’ remarkably low metabolic rates account for their distinctively slow rates of growth, reproduction, and aging.
They don't include healing in that list, but I think it's clearly implied.

Cats probably have greater than average daily energy expenditure rates for mammals, in fact.
posted by jamjam at 5:09 PM on July 4, 2020


That formula suggests that when dogs are born they are negative infinity human years old.
posted by louigi at 7:36 PM on July 7, 2020


That must be why puppies are helpless at birth - it takes them a few weeks to forget the eternal horror they've been through. Longer than you think!
posted by moonmilk at 10:35 AM on July 8, 2020


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