Dr Kate Creevy
speaker
16 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2013
last heard May 2013
Dr Kate Creevy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It is accurate over the species of dog, but within any given dog breed it falls apart a little bit precisely because if you calculate total lifespan, you get one number for comparing dog, quote, dog years to human years.
But in the earlier periods of life, dogs age faster.
That is to say they reach sexual or reproductive maturity and then skeletal maturity in a compressed period of time compared to their adulthood and then their geriatric years.
Within very small dogs, toy breed dogs, and some of your dogs at 15 or 20 pounds, they can reach reproductive maturity at less than one year of age and skeletal maturity at a similar time.
With some of your giant breed dogs, they may not reach sexual or reproductive maturity for over a year, up to a year and a half, and up to two years for skeletal maturity.
So in that first period of life, the large dogs appear to be aging more slowly in that they take longer to achieve these benchmarks.
But once they've achieved adulthood, their adult experience is compressed compared to that of small breed dogs, which is actually very, very interesting and a little bit difficult to completely explain.
It's a different situation because they're different species.
They're closely related species, to be sure, but they are different species.
Now, the next question that follows from that is define a species, and that's somewhat trickier than you would hope.
One classic definition of species is that population of animals which can interbreed.
Therefore, you can imagine a scenario where you could breed a chihuahua to a Great Dane and make puppies.
it is not probably true that you could breed a house cat to a lion and make kittens.
Just giving a try.
We learned that sterilized dogs did tend to live longer than intact dogs.
It is very early to extrapolate to the human experience.
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