The dog is very closely connected with people, and a small puppy quickly becomes a member of a pack, and in our way – a family. But the dog grows old much faster than the man, and the owner with anxiety calculates how much longer the Boy will stretch. Here it is difficult to refrain from comparing dog and human years. First, 1 year of dog’s life was equated to 4-5 years of a person’s life.
The errors of such arithmetic are great, especially when it comes to the first two years of a dog’s life. A more accurate recount is obtained when the dog is assessed for the first year of life for 14 years, for the second year – 7 years, and for each subsequent – for 5 years. Thus, a three-year-old dog in full bloom corresponds, in our understanding, to a 26-year-old man (and not to 12-15-year-olds, as it turned out when calculating the first scheme). A ten-year-old dog can be considered to have survived to 61 years, a fifteen-year-old dog to 86 years old.
But even here there are subtleties in domestic animals of the same species, but different breeds, the average life expectancy is not the same. Dogs of small breeds, as well as small crossbreeds live to the age of 14 without special stress, and a 10-year-old dog of large breed can be considered a long-liver. For the Great Danes, the 8-year milestone may become irresistible. Among dogs of the same breed, the individual life expectancy also varies greatly. Veterinarians say that in their practice they met small and medium dogs of 18 years and even 20 years of age (these are already indisputable long-livers).
