The old “seven dog years for every human one year” calculation is clearly wrong.
Photo via dogster.com
You know how old your dog is in human years, but how do you translate this to “dog years”? The old saw that one of our years equals seven for the dog. But it turns out that this is overly simplistic and, frankly, not true. A fun article on dogster.com looks at the question of how we should really consider this equivalency:
Dog years calculators on the Internet vary when it comes to the first year of a dog’s life. The numbers we’ve seen in our research range from 10.5 up to 18 dog years. The majority settle for something in between; received wisdom currently is that in general, when a dog is 365 days old, he is roughly 15 in human years. That may seem very rapid, but consider that dogs mature at a much quicker rate than we do.