West Highland White Terrier – Learning from Dogs

Our lovely old German Shepherd is 10 today.

Yes, Pharaoh was born back on June 3rd 2003. So today, in human years he is 10. In the old traditional ‘dog years is seven times times human years‘ he would be 70. But according to a recent item on BBC News there is a more accurate way of calculating dog years.

Longevity secrets of readers’ pets who lived past 100 ‘dog years’

Thanks to our dog age calculator, people have been reassessing the age of their furry friends.

It put a new spin on the old saying that the age of dogs could be better understood by multiplying the number of years since their birth by seven.

You can read more here. That dog age calculator is here.

Dog years: The calculator

Working out your dog’s true age used to be a case of simply multiplying it by seven. But it’s more complicated than that, and here’s a handy calculator to do it for you.

A recent Magazine feature explained that:

Different breeds of dog age at varying speeds

Dogs age at varying speeds at different stages of their lives

With that in mind, we’ve built a calculator for you to work out your dog’s true age – its age in “dog years”.

Alternatively, you can find out how old you would be if you were a dog. You can choose to be a labrador, a spaniel, a whippet, or any one of 20 breeds.

The calculator uses these multipliers for the first two years of a dog’s life:

12.5 for small dogs

10.5 for medium-sized dogs

9 for large dogs

Then, for the third and subsequent years of the dog’s life, each human year has to be multiplied by between 4.3 and 13.4 years, depending on the breed:

Small: Dachshund (Miniature) 4.32, Border Terrier 4.47, Lhasa Apso 4.49, Shih Tzu 4.78, Whippet Medium 5.30, Chihuahua 4.87, West Highland White Terrier 4.96, Beagle 5.20, Miniature Schnauzer 5.46, Spaniel (Cocker) 5.55, Cavalier King Charles 5.77, Pug 5.95, French Bulldog 7.65

Medium: Spaniel 5.46, Retriever (Labrador) 5.74, Golden Retriever 5.74, Staffordshire Bull Terrier 5.33, Bulldog 13.42

Large: German Shepherd 7.84, Boxer 8.90

The calculator does not work for cross breeds, sadly, but on average these live 1.22 years longer than pure breeds, according to Dan O’Neill (from Petts Wood in London…) who is researching the subject for a PhD at the Royal Veterinary College.

Nor does the calculator work for cats. What we can say is that the average life expectancy of a cat is 12.1 years, which equates to 64 human years.

Guidelines issued by the American Association of Feline Practitioners say that cats reach 10 human years in their first six months and are approximately 24 at the age of two years. After this their age increases by four “cat years” every year.

So dear Pharaoh is the equivalent of an 80-year-old human! The breed has an average life expectancy of 9.73 years. (Source: BBC calculations on data from UK Kennel Club and US Veterinary Medical Database.)

Going to leave you for today with three photographs of Pharaoh taken the day I first saw Pharaoh as a puppy, back on the 12th August 2003. The woman holding Pharaoh is Sandra Tucker who runs Jutone Kennels in Devon, England., where Pharaoh was born 10 years ago this day!