Determining Your Dog’s Age

As a responsible pet owner, knowing your dog’s age can be a vital factor in maintaining and improving his health and quality of life. While all dogs should be given the highest quality, appropriate food and treated according to their health and activity levels, young dogs and seniors may have different needs.

Since many of us adopt or rescue pets, whose exact birth date and health history is unknown, we must rely on other ways to estimate our dog’s age.

1. Examine the condition of your dog’s teeth. Puppies normally get all their baby teeth in when they’re about 2 months old, and their permanent teeth will not start to appear till they’re about 3 ½ months. All of it shall be in around the time your pooch turns 7 months and then it will stay white and clean until your dog is one year old. After 3 years, your pet’s teeth will most likely show some dullness and tartar build-up. From that time until Fido reaches 5 years old, all of his teeth will indicate tartar build up and wear. Beyond that, serious wear and even oral diseases may be observable.

2. Check the color of your dog’s fur. Some canines start to grey by the time they are 7 to 10 years old.

3. Assess your dog’s hearing. As dogs grow older, they often lose some of their sense of hearing.

To better understand your dog’s basic needs according to their age, it’s useful to compare against how old they might be in human years. We’ve all heard the very basic calculation of taking the dog’s age and multiplying by 7. But, this method is actually quite inaccurate.

How to Calculate Fido’s Age into Human Years

Dogs generally mature so much faster than humans; reaching the equivalent of our 21 years in only 2. However, after the first couple of years, the ratio tends to settle down depending on the size and the breed of the pooch. For small breeds, the ratio decelerate at the rate of 5:1, 6:1 for medium breeds, and then 7:1 for large breeds. To give you an idea, a 10-year old Great Dane, for instance, would be about 80 years old, while a pug of the same age would only be about 64.

Using the table below, we can translate Fido’s age into human years with the use of the following general ranges for sizes of dogs:

· Small dog = 20 lbs. or less

· Medium dog + 21 to 50 lbs.

· Large dog = More than 50 lbs.