The dog owners are always anxious to know about the age of their pets; it’s a curiosity for them to identify how old their puppy is. But unfortunately, there’s a scientific belief that one year of a dog’s life is approximately 7 years of human life; this rule is called the classic rule of seven.
Now how to calculate dog years? We can identify a dog’s age in many ways, like by the formation of their teeth and their body development. You can also check the condition of their eyes as well as the color of the fur and their hearing ability.
Everything that will help you in identifying the age of your dog will be discussed here. So please go through the entire article to gain the information.
How to Calculate Dog Years? – Factors Through Which the Owner Can Identify a Dog’s Age
The dog owners need to know their dog’s age as many diseases get increase with the aging of their dogs and also to give them proper medication as per their needs.
The few tips that will help you to discover the age of your dog are discussed below.
Noticing the Dog’s Teeth
It is the best way to determine a dog’s age by the condition of their teeth as there’s always a sign in their teeth as per their age. For example, the permanent teeth of dogs were whiter than the baby teeth and remained clean without any disease up to the age of 3 years.
However, from the 3rd to 5th-year, tartar will develop, and the teeth begin to get dull, and after 5 years, the teeth will get diseases.
Condition of the Eye
A dog owner can also guess his pet’s age by looking at the condition of the eye. In dogs above the age of seven years, the cells will get packed tightly, which will harden the protein of the lens and will make the lens appear cloudy.
Checking the Color of Fur
It’s also very easy to guess the age of a dog by the color changes in its fur. The color of the puppy coat keeps on changing from the fourth to sixth month of its age, and the fur will keep on lightening with its increasing age. In some dogs, the hair becomes gray from its 7th to the tenth year.
The Capability of Hearing
With the increasing age, dogs used to lose their power of hearing which causes anxiety and makes them aggressive. So if you can notice such kind of behavioral changes in your dogs like its aggressive nature, then it is because of the increase in age.
Activity Level
Another way of identifying a dog’s age is by checking the activity level of your dog. Activity levels differ from stage to stage in a dog’s life.
So if your dog was playful and active earlier and has now become lazy and inactive, then you should take the pet to a vet because it can be due to some diseases due to aging.
Have you ever come across the techniques and phenomena adopted by scientists to calculate the exact age of dogs? If not, then there is nothing to worry about as now we are going to discuss the theories and rules followed by scientists for determining a dog’s age.
The Classic Rule of Seven
Earlier, people had a belief that one year of a dog’s life is equal to seven years of human life, but now with the passage of time, science has developed and has made it clear that this belief was quite wrong in some species.
In addition, because the aging of dogs differs from breed to breed, that’s why the counting of age equivalent to humans will not work in the case of many dogs.
This theory was given by basing on the fact that the average lifespan of dogs in 10 years is equivalent to that of humans in 70 years.But still, this theory can be preferred in some exceptional cases as it works in a few breeds.
DNA Methylation
As the historical theory named the classic rule of seven is not enough for detecting a dog’s age, the scientists have preferred to go with a phenomenon named DNA Methylation to solve the mystery of canine age calculation.
DNA Methylation is an epigenetic mechanism that works for the regulation of gene expression by adopting the genes involved in gene repression.
During this phenomenon, the methyl groups get attached to the deoxyribonucleic acids [DNA], but the DNA doesn’t change itself during this process. This phenomenon is a very important part of epigenetics and is also responsible for aging in both humans and animals.
To compare the equivalent ages of dogs and humans through DNA methylation, the epigenetic clocks of people were compared to one of the canines for knowing information about the fact that genes are related to the fact of aging.
When the methylation rate of around 104 labrador dogs between the age of 4 weeks and 6 years were compared to 320 humans from age one to 103, the rates of similarity were dissatisfying, but some stages of a dog’s life follow the same as humans while aging.
As a result of the experiment, the 12-year life span of a dog comes out to be equivalent to 70 years of human life.
The Logarithmic Rule
Later on, a new technique was developed by the scientists to determine the age of dogs. This technique was a logarithmic formula that required a bit more mathematical knowledge than the normal one, which was simply done by dividing by seven.
For example, the formula is [human_age = 16ln(dog_age) + 31]; in this formula, you just have to multiply the natural log of your dog’s age by sixteen and then equate it with the human age, and the result will be the exact age of your dog.
After doing some experiments with this formula, the outcomes were like a 2-year dog is equivalent in age to a 42-year-old human and a 5 years old dog is equivalent to a 56.75-year-old human, whereas a 10-year dog is equivalent to a 67.8-year-old human.
This formula is not capable of guessing the exact age of dogs but was appropriate in detecting the age of some few breeds. So it can often be used in some cases.
Specific Estimation for Guessing Your Dog’s Age
Rather than the previously mentioned laws and theories, there are still some exact estimations that were believed by the scientists to measure the proper age of a dog.
The estimations are
- The first year in a dog’s life is equivalent to around 15 years of human life; as per this estimation, if a dog is 2 years in age, then the particular dog is equivalent to 30 years of a human.
- The second year of a dog’s life is equivalent to nine years of human age, which means the equivalent age of dogs to humans keeps on decreasing.
- Each additional year in a dog’s life is equivalent to 4 or 5 human years.
These estimations were found very effective and useful while counting the age of a dog. Hence can be preferred for all the cases and applies to all types of breeds.
The Dog Age Chart
Below is the dog age calculator chart referring to which you can easily find out your dog’s age by comparing it with a human’s age as per the size of your dog.
| Age of your dog | Age in human years |
| Dog age | Small | Medium | large | Giant |
| 1 | 15 | 15 | 15 | 12 |
| 2 | 24 | 24 | 24 | 22 |
| 3 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 31 |
| 4 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 38 |
| 5 | 36 | 36 | 36 | 45 |
| 6 | 40 | 42 | 45 | 49 |
| 7 | 44 | 47 | 50 | 56 |
| 8 | 48 | 51 | 55 | 64 |
| 9 | 52 | 56 | 61 | 71 |
| 10 | 56 | 60 | 66 | 79 |
| 11 | 60 | 65 | 72 | 86 |
| 12 | 64 | 69 | 77 | 93 |
| 13 | 68 | 74 | 82 | 100 |
| 14 | 72 | 78 | 88 | 107 |
| 15 | 76 | 83 | 93 | 114 |
| 16 | 80 | 88 | 98 | 121 |
By preferring this age chart, you can easily identify the approximate age of your dog. For example, if your dog’s age is 12 and is medium in size, then its age in human years will be 64.
Why Do Smaller Dogs Age a Bit Slower Than Giant Ones?
As per the studies done by the scientific authorities, information was obtained that aging in dogs is due to a faster rate of metabolism and also because of the excessive activity of the heart.
Therefore, while preferring the age chart above, we can see that smaller dogs were aging slower than the giant ones and were living longer than the larger ones.
The reason behind this can be the faster cell development, abnormal tissue development at the organ level tissue organization, and also due to the strain of its larger size in its physiological process.
Hereby we have discussed all the things that will be helpful for you in every aspect while determining your dog’s age, like the dog’s age chart, the methods and techniques developed by scientists, and body signs which can indicate aging.
