As dog owners, we often like to convert our dog’s age to “people years” using the age-old 1 dog year equals 7 human years. Recent research studies on dogs’ DNA show that the math is actually a bit more complicated, and that the ratio of dog years to human years changes as the dogs age.
There is value in converting your dog’s age to human years since it will give you a better understanding of where your dog is at developmentally and health wise. Depending on their size, dogs become mentally adults at 2 years old and reach senior status between ages 7 and 10. Calculating your dog’s “human age” with this new formula will help put those numbers into perspective.
How to Calculate Your Dog’s Age
When we map a dog’s age progression to a person’s, we find that dogs age more rapidly in the first years of their life. The aging process slows down as they get older. We can break it down like this for the average dog:
- The first year of life for a dog is equivalent to 15 years for a human.
- The second year of life is equivalent to 9 years for a human.
- Every year after that is about 4 or 5 human years.
So if your dog is 5 years old, they are approximately 36 people years old. A 10 year old dog is about 60 years old.
Size and breed also impact these numbers. In general, the larger the dog, the shorter the life expectancy. This is an interesting phenomenon because giant breed dogs – those over 100 pounds – age more slowly in the initial years and are often not considered full grown until they are more than 2 years old. Their aging process then speeds up rapidly, and some are considered seniors by the time they are 5 years old. In human years, a 1 year old giant dog is about 12, and by 10 years, they are 80 human years old.
Of course, your dog’s behavior is more important than the match in figuring out what your dog can do. Some dogs will keep their playful puppy nature well into their adult years and others will begin slowing down at the human equivalent of 40 years. In the end, it is more important to tailor exercise and stimulation to your dog rather than the numbers.