We are dog crazy.
Seattle is famous for having more dogs than children, and the distinction is becoming increasingly blurred. The Pew Research Center recently surveyed pet owners. 97% said their pets are family, and more than half consider pets as much a part of the family as human members.
Pat Klotz in Lake Forest Park is one of them. She calls Lucy, her 11-year-old Husky-Labrador mix, her “four-legged daughter.” They travel together, walk together, socialize together. But unlike a human daughter, Pat knows she can’t expect to outlive her furry one. “It makes me very nervous,” Pat says about Lucy’s advancing age. ”Although I tell her every day she’s going to live forever.”
Lucy won’t live forever, but the Dog Aging Project is devoted to allowing her to live longer and healthier. Dog Aging Project (DAP) was launched at the University of Washington and has grown into a national study spanning several education and research institutions, powered by more than 50,000 dogs and counting.
Researcher Matt Kaeberlein is the co-founder, but before that, he was a dog lover. “I went into this because I wanted to make my dog live longer and healthier, and I wanted to make other people’s dogs live longer and healthier.”
Dog Aging Project encourages every kind of dog to become a part of their study. They collect information from owners and their veterinarians about their dogs’ lives and lifestyles, including their diet, activity level, weight, breed and age. They also track their physical and mental health.
For owners, it’s a tragedy that their dogs’ lifespans are short, but that may paradoxically make it easier for researchers to find ways to extend their lives because they can see trace changes to health and lifespan in a compressed timeframe. Kaeberlein says, “We can both study the aging process and potentially determine whether or not strategies to slow aging work in dogs in a much more reasonable time frame.”
Because the study has so many participants and can allow for so many variables according to size and breed, they’ve already made some significant findings in the six years they’ve collected information. Just as with humans, they believe canine longevity is part nature, part nurture. The breakdown is likely about 25% genetic and 75% environmentally determined. That means, there are a lot of dog owners can do to influence their dog’s longevity.
First, the things that are out of your control.
The biggest factor in your dog’s lifespan: Their size. “Body size is the biggest determinant of life expectancy in dogs,” Kaeberlein says. “Bigger dogs seems to age faster than small dogs do.” He also says mixed breeds have a longer life expectancy: purebreds live about a year less than mixed-breed dogs of the same size. Some health conditions are also associated with specific breeds: for example, Labradors often have hip problems, French bulldogs often get degenerative disc disease, and chihuahuas are likely to have dental disease. But you may be able to influence the other 75%.
Kaeberlein says there’s an epidemic of obesity among dogs, just as there is among their owners. It won’t surprise you that exercise and a healthy diet are key to keeping your dog from becoming overweight. But DAP’s research turned up an eyebrow-raising relationship between feeding schedule and health.
They looked at 10 common health conditions in dogs, and compared that to the frequency of meals. They separated dogs into those that get fed once a day and those that get fed twice or more. Kaeberlein was surprised at their finding, “In all 10 health conditions, the dogs fed once a day were less likely to have been diagnosed with that condition.”
They also found that exercise is recommended to keep your pup at a healthy weight and can fight another common health problem: canine cognitive dysfunction, otherwise known as doggy dementia. As many as 35% of older dogs develop it, but Kaeberlein says DAP research shows that “Dogs that are more active seem to be protected against dementia.”
After playtime and mealtime are over, DAP research shows you should follow that with brushing time. “Periodontal disease is a risk factor for dementia, cardiovascular disease, diabetes,” says Kaeberlein. “So, there’s a connection between the health of the mouth and the health of the rest of the body. In some ways, the health of the mouth can be the canary in the coal mine for what’s happening to the rest of the body.”
Dog Aging Project hopes to find a whole flock of “canaries” with its research. Many of the findings are interesting and promising, but Kaeberlein cautions that they prove correlation, not causation. For example, they show that dogs who are only fed once a day have lower incidents of 10 common health conditions, but they do not know why. They need funding and interest to continue to support the project so they can find the answers to those deeper questions.
Like Pat, we’d all like our dogs to live forever. They won’t, but they might live longer.
To be part of the effort to make that happen, you and your pup can get involved in the Dog Aging Project, by visiting their website, https://dogagingproject.org/
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