Just finished reading my latest copy of Dogs Today and two things stood out
First was 'The measure of success' its about this thing called the Karlton Index that is being launched by Philippa Pobinson and basickly as i understand it, she is monitering how breeds are improving health through a number of ways, using info form breed clubs, KC, BVA and other info made public about breed health. I dout i could ackuratly explain it but it looked realy good and the aim seems to be to encourage and measure improvemnts in health and to shine a light on how well some are doing and highlight areas for improvment for others. She had some good things to say for the dachshund clubs and the wheaten health initiave. I dont know if Philippa is doing it all by herself or if she has others helping, i hope she has help as i think it sound like a good idea but a very big job for one person.

Second was 'Jemima Harrison: Why do little dogs live longer than big dogs?' It was a very intresting artical, the main point was that on adverage smaller breeds tend to live longer than larger breeds (it did mention that there are exceptions both within breeds and with breeds themselves) and quoted KC breed health surveys (but did say that some had few replys so would skew the data) but after speaking to a dutch scientist who did a paper on the subject which concluded that overall smaller dogs did out live larger dogs, Jemima asked the scientist if she thought we should be breeding smaller dogs and the reply was that the problem was more how fast the dog grows rather than the size so breeding for slower growing dogs could improve health. Jemima then went on to write that from a large database the scientist found that smaller individuals in a breed lived slightly less long as the bigger ones. (very intresting, i wonder why)  Ok now what confuses me straight after the quote about smaller dogs within breeds not living as long Jemima says that she still thinks people should be breeding for smaller big dogs, eventhough she has just quoted the scientist saying that these smaller dogs with in a breed dont live as long as the bigger dogs.

So what is it then people should be doing? On the one hand JH is saying how these larger breeds tend to not live as long but then goes on to say that she belives that people should be breeding for the smaller examples in these breed eventhough this scientist says they tend to live even less??

Well my thoughts are regarding JH anything she  has to say is a load on nonsense and it doesnt suprise me at all that she is saying one thing in on sentence then saying something different in another, the woman is a complete idiot as far as im concerend.

http://thekarltonindex.com/

I have often pondered this point and it also occurs to me that you do not see as many big pensioners. Now I know they are the same species and there are fewer humans at, let's say, 6'6'' and over but I wonder if any studies have been done on that - it may be relevant, it may not - but it helps me pass the time in traffic.
Jeff.

An interesting point. It's only really since WW2 that the western human diet has improved so much as to increase the average height, and the people born since then haven't really reached pensionable age yet. With the corresponding advances in medical care the average lifespan has also increased (when the Old Age Pension was introduced a very low percentage of workers lived long enough to claim it - nowadays it's assumed you'll be receiving it for at least 10 years) I don't think it'll be possible to correlate meaningful statistics about human height and lifespan.

> Ok now what confuses me straight after the quote about smaller dogs within breeds not living as long Jemima says that she still thinks people should be breeding for smaller big dogs, eventhough she has just quoted the scientist saying that these smaller dogs with in a breed dont live as long as the bigger dogs

Because it has nothing to do with the dogs, IMO Jemima simply doesn't like anything she considers an 'extreme' & large, esp. giant dogs fit the catagory 'extreme'  (as long as you are prepared to ignore the fact that the 'giant' size can also be reached by wolves and is a size that the mollosors came form in the first place then she can lable it as 'mutant' or 'freak' too).

She is the first to accuse breeders of breeding 'mutant freaks' to fit thier own ideals of what thier dogs should LOOK like, yet she will blatently ignore scientific evidence (regarding the smaller dogs from large breeds dying younger than thier larger counterparts) and bang on about how SHE wants dogs bred SMALLER - pot, kettle???

> An interesting point. It's only really since WW2 that the western human diet has improved so much as to increase the average height, and the people born since then haven't really reached pensionable age yet. With the corresponding advances in medical care the average lifespan has also increased

People also 'shrink' as they get older. My mother, who was always the same height as me is now a good 2" shorter at age 76, my dad who was 5ft 11" has also 'shrunk' by about 2" at 79, both have good posture so it's not caused by slouching.

Yes, age and gravity affect the cartilage in the joints, particularly in the spine, causing the 'gaps' between the bones to become smaller, losing height.

> Well my thoughts are regarding JH anything she has to say is a load on nonsense and it doesnt suprise me at all that she is saying one thing in on sentence then saying something different in another

Hear , hear !!!

"An early paper illustrating the greater longevity of shorter people appeared in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization in 1992. Since then there has been  presented substantial findings showing that shorter, smaller people live longer. The reason for this is that bigger bodies have more cells and these cells are subject to replacement due to wear or damage. Hayflick pointed out many years ago that most human body cells have limited capacity for duplication. Since bigger people require a larger number of duplications to reach maturity, they have fewer potential cell doublings left to replace defective or dead cells. Thus, the functional capability of vital organs declines with advanced age because damaged cells can't be replaced. A new study also showed that oxidative damage to cells increases at a higher rate with increasing height; e.g., an 18% increase in height leads to an 83% increase in cellular damage. Current gerontological thinking is that oxidative damage leads to aging and death.
A few years ago, a comprehensive study of about 300 height and cancer papers, concluded that taller people had a 20 to 60% higher incidence of cancer compared to shorter people. More recently, breast, testicular, and prostate cancer studies found taller women and men suffered from substantially higher cancer rates."

what people shrink! i never knew that. man and i thought i was short now.

So what is it then people should be doing? On the one hand JH is saying how these larger breeds tend to not live as long but then goes on to say that she belives that people should be breeding for the smaller examples in these breed eventhough this scientist says they tend to live even less??

No great confusion, Jo. The Dutch scientist did find that lighter dogs within a breed in one database (but not in another) did live very slightly longer (a matter of days rather than years). But there is a very strong correlation between size and longevity. The overwhelming evidence is that there is a cost to being a very big dog in terms of quality of life as they age/reduced lifespan. Given that many breeds have got substantially bigger over the years I am suggesting that great size is something that needs thinking about. Bigger is not necessarily better.

Jemima

> there is a cost to being a very big dog in terms of quality of life as they age/reduced lifespan

A reduced lifespan is not a lack of quality of life. A dog has no idea of how long it has lived or how long it has left, it only knows how happy/healthy it is at any given moment.

A lack of QUALITY of life is a very good reason to have any animal euthanised, but I doubt you would find any vet willing to agree that a healthy, young giant dog was lacking in QUALITY of life becasue it was not expected to reach 15yrs old!

I accept the fact that larger dog in general do not live as long a smaller dogs, but it is not a FACT that a shorter life equates to a lack of QUALITY.
QUALITY does not equal QUANTITY.

What makes me sad is we have had a couple of threads recently about keeping aging dogs alive, even when they are merely existing and are not happy - getting your dog to reach the late teens (or whatever age you deem to be an acceptable age for a dog to get too) is really not what anybody should be striving for - it is HEALTHY & happy dogs.

I wonder how many smaller dogs have been kept going for years & years when they no-longer enjoy life, but thier owners can't bear to part with them? It's much easier for an owner of a smaller dog to do things like lift the dog for toilet trips when it's legs have 'gone' or bring it back inside when it's aimlessly wandering around the garden in a daze, not knowing what it's doing, or lift it from laying as it can't get up on it's own. There are size issues with the larger dogs that mean when they are unable to do things for thierselfs thir owners can't do it for them and there is no choice but to have the dog PTS,  which is really the best thing for the dog anyway but with a smaller dog, the owner has a 'choice' to keep the dog going (for thier self) as the owner is capeable of aiding the dogs existence.......
The above is also not just an 'age thing', any mobility problem arising from any cause (accident, injury etc.) can make the larger dog unmanageble by the owner and force euthanasia.

A long-lived dog may have spent many of it's final years suffering -  there is no way I see why anybody should start making large/giant breeds smaller in order to stretch thier lifes out longer. What I do see a need for is more responsible breeding so ANY life ANY dog has, is as healthy as possible, it doesn't matter to the dog how long that life is.

Was this done in a specific country, or worldwide stats?  And was cause of death taken into account - ie. PTS in old age, or death from a specific disease / condition. I have started a database for a breed as the UK lifespan is noticeably shorter than other countries.  At first I thought it was the smallish gene pool here and the objection to importing new blood over the past 2 decades that was a factor.  However when I started to go outside of the UK I found a large proportion of UK exports to Europe, Scandinavia, and the USA who had long out lived their UK retained siblings.  Not just by a year or two but 3, 4 and 5 yrs.  I found a bitch last month who is still going in her mid teens in the USA from a UK kennel with dogs that have not passed 11 yrs old here.  Is it diet (possibly), exercise, or as I suspect the unwillingness for UK owners to spend on specific dietary and medical needs of older large dogs?  Size in this case does not seem to be a factor at all, in fact the longest lived on record was a bitch who was bigger than many males.

>I wonder how many smaller dogs have been kept going for years & years when they no-longer enjoy life, but thier owners can't bear to part with them? It's much easier for an owner of a smaller dog to do things like lift the dog for toilet trips when it's legs have 'gone' or bring it back inside when it's aimlessly wandering around the garden in a daze, not knowing what it's doing, or lift it from laying as it can't get up on it's own. There are size issues with the larger dogs that mean when they are unable to do things for thierselfs thir owners can't do it for them and there is no choice but to have the dog PTS,  which is really the best thing for the dog anyway but with a smaller dog, the owner has a 'choice' to keep the dog going (for thier self) as the owner is capeable of aiding the dogs existence.......

I see that a lot.

> I see that a lot.

:(

> A reduced lifespan is not a lack of quality of life. A dog has no idea of how long it has lived or how long it has left, it only knows how happy/healthy it is at any given moment.
>
> A lack of QUALITY of life is a very good reason to have any animal euthanised, but I doubt you would find any vet willing to agree that a healthy, young giant dog was lacking in QUALITY of life becasue it was not expected to reach 15yrs old!
>
> I accept the fact that larger dog in general do not live as long a smaller dogs, but it is not a FACT that a shorter life equates to a lack of QUALITY.
> QUALITY does not equal QUANTITY.
>
> What makes me sad is we have had a couple of threads recently about keeping aging dogs alive, even when they are merely existing and are not happy - getting your dog to reach the late teens (or whatever age you deem to be an acceptable age for a dog to get too) is really not what anybody should be striving for - it is HEALTHY & happy dogs.
>
> I wonder how many smaller dogs have been kept going for years & years when they no-longer enjoy life, but thier owners can't bear to part with them? It's much easier for an owner of a smaller dog to do things like lift the dog for toilet trips when it's legs have 'gone' or bring it back inside when it's aimlessly wandering around the garden in a daze, not knowing what it's doing, or lift it from laying as it can't get up on it's own. There are size issues with the larger dogs that mean when they are unable to do things for thierselfs thir owners can't do it for them and there is no choice but to have the dog PTS,  which is really the best thing for the dog anyway but with a smaller dog, the owner has a 'choice' to keep the dog going (for thier self) as the owner is capeable of aiding the dogs existence.......
> The above is also not just an 'age thing', any mobility problem arising from any cause (accident, injury etc.) can make the larger dog unmanageble by the owner and force euthanasia.
>
> A long-lived dog may have spent many of it's final years suffering -  there is no way I see why anybody should start making large/giant breeds smaller in order to stretch thier lifes out longer. What I do see a need for is more responsible breeding so ANY life ANY dog has, is as healthy as possible, it doesn't matter to the dog how long that life is.

What an excellent post!

No great confusion, Jo. The Dutch scientist did find that lighter dogs within a breed in one database (but not in another) did live very slightly longer (a matter of days rather than years). But there is a very strong correlation between size and longevity. The overwhelming evidence is that there is a cost to being a very big dog in terms of quality of life as they age/reduced lifespan. Given that many breeds have got substantially bigger over the years I am suggesting that great size is something that needs thinking about. Bigger is not necessarily better.


thanks for the reply Jemima, so if its only a matter of days between the big and small within a breed would it not be better to forget size and phocue on breeding for slower growing dogs? which the scientist said could improve health so would surley increase the adverage life span more than a few days (if she is right about the problem being more growth rate that is).

Does anyone know whether small elephants live longer :)

If you'd like to look at the paper, Harkback, the pdf is online - Google "Do Large Dogs Die Young Frietson Galis".

The dataset that found that smaller dogs within a breed died very slightly younger than bigger dogs was the VMDB which collates American vet school data. It is a large and very useful resource but needs to be viewed with some caution because it is not a random sample of the general dog population; it's a sample of the general sick dog population. When looking at other things (such as in-general breed longevity) its findings do not always correlate with other data. For instance, it tends to find breed longevity to be lower (a lot lower in some cases) than other surveys (for the not unobvious reason that the dataset comprises dogs that have been referred to vet schools).

I'm very interested to hear that you are finding UK lifespan shorter in your breed than overseas. I do not think there is much evidence of this in other breeds but have a trawl here: http://users.pullman.com/lostriver/breeddata.htm

This site lists the VMDB data mentioned above and, as you can see, it often does not square with other surveys.

Jemima

The age thing also applies to horses - a small pony will (most of the time) live a lot longer than a big horse.....

thanks for the reply Jemima, so if its only a matter of days between the big and small within a breed would it not be better to forget size and phocue on breeding for slower growing dogs? which the scientist said could improve health so would surley increase the adverage life span more than a few days (if she is right about the problem being more growth rate that is).

Yes, I think it would help a lot to select for slower-growing dogs. But because size in and of itself clearly has a huge impact on lifespan - and because the bigger and heavier the dog is the more strain there is likely to be on all its body systems - in my opinion (and it is just that, as I have made clear) I think it's something the giant breeds should be thinking about, especially where height and weight has creeped-up over the years, as it has done in many often for no real reason.

Jemima

> I think it's something the giant breeds should be thinking about, especially where height and weight has creeped-up over the years, as it has done in many often for no real reason

Yes but my breed height and weight has crept DOWN over the years in the UK, so much so that now a good proportion of females, and many males just scrape in on the minimum height for the breed standard.  However it has not extended the life expectancy at all, maybe even the reverse.

Yes but my breed height and weight has crept DOWN over the years in the UK, so much so that now a good proportion of females, and many males just scrape in on the minimum height for the breed standard.  However it has not extended the life expectancy at all, maybe even the reverse.

This is the thing, Some large breeds have been around for many many years. Why is it now okay to question their life span?
When you start messing around with hight you start getting another problems.

Most large breeds are smaller than they were originally but are still large.
I would sooner have 7-10 years with a large dog that was happy and healthy that had a shorter life span than a large breed that had been shrunk and had heart problems, breathing problems and so on.

> This is the thing, Some large breeds have been around for many many years. Why is it now okay to question their life span?

Because in my own breed there is a gaping difference in life span in the UK to those abroad, even those from the same bloodlines or litters that have been exported / imported.  Why not question it? 

My concern re the so called scientific 'stuff' cited in this thread, ie Dr Kelly M Cassidy and Frieston Gallis, is that when I enter them into Google, whilst there's lots coming up about them, there seems to be an alarming lack of academic backup. Unless of course I am searching incorrectly :-(

Hey ho though, I am a mere physicist so what would I know. :-D

The same does occur in many domesticated species of animal where there is a significant differentiation in size. Someone mentioned horses earlier (which I didn't know) and rabbits are another good example.

However, something often overlooked in discussions like this is that with improved medical care, diets etc, we have extended artificially the lifespans of many organisms, including our own species. You only have to look at the news most weeks for there to be some mention of the problems associated with an 'ageing' population. It might sound lovely to think that we and our animals are living longer, but at what cost? People and animals 100 or so years ago lived far shorter lives, but they did not usually have to deal with the problems associated with 'old age' arthritis, alzheimers, heart disease, certain cancers etc. In 'wild' populations, the ability to survive without intervention limits the lifespan so organisms are not adapted if you like, to live to great ages. Increased longevity is not always a measure for sucess. Personally I would sooner pass over when mind and body begins to fail than survive incapacitated through endless years. As other posters have said, it is quality of life not quantity which is important.

Because in my own breed there is a gaping difference in life span in the UK to those abroad, even those from the same bloodlines or litters that have been exported / imported.  Why not question it?

I do not know what your breed is.

My main question is where did you get the information on the average life span? As a friend of mine is in a "small" breed (small number of dogs however a large breed) and she believes strongly the "breed average" life span is infact incorrect from the kennel club website as only a few dogs took part. America has larger numbers of the dogs in her breed and she found the average life span given by the american breed club was more to her experience.

In my breed I have now and the one I am getting next year both have longer life span's than oversea's (my current breed is the smaller side of medium and the breed I am getting next year is large) In the large breed the life span is a whole 5 years difference.

wolves rarely live to 10 years in the wild

> main question is where did you get the information on the average life span?

From surveys done by the breed clubs in the USA, Scandinavia, and the UK one I undertook last year.  Also from health cert records such as CHIC (where people have been bothered to records deaths).  Actually if you take the time and WANT to research your breeds longevity it is not difficult, I was able to go back to the 1950's in the USA quite thoroughly, ditto Scandinavia and Europe.  The hardest part was / is the UK as breeders / owners are still reluctant to disclose cause of death, and often age at death even though names of dogs or breeders were not to be included in the survey.