The short answer to this question is because larger dogs age more quickly than smaller dogs. But before getting more in-depth on that answer you might ask why is this important? This is important and puzzling to many researchers because normally in most species on earth larger mammals live longer than smaller ones. For Example, elephants can get up to 70 years old in the wild, while mice reach only 4 years of age. So the puzzling question remains why are domesticated canines different from the rest of their mammal counterparts? This is because larger dogs age more quickly and as a result of this they are subjected to a higher death risk due to a number of different causes. An interesting fact about dog life expectancy related to their size is that an increase of 4.4 pounds in a dogs body mass leads to a loss of approximately 1 month in life expectancy. Here is a quote from a scientist who was interviewed by the article publisher about the lives of larger dogs "Their lives seem to unwind in fast motion," -Cornelia Kraus. Scientists now want to research the growth and health histories of many large dog breads and pinpoint the leading causes of death for large dogs. For example, larger canines seem to suffer from cancer more often, this would be expected because large dogs grow more than smaller dog breeds, and cancer is has to do with abnormal cell growth which would be more likely to occur in dogs that grow more.
My Link: http://www.livescience.com/27676-why-small-pups-outlive-large-dogs.html
NOS Themes:
- Science is collaborative: Many scientists and investigators have been researching and gathering data on this topic for a number of years to get a wide range of solid data.
- Role of motivation and curiosity: This article shows that science is motivated by curiosity because if people hadn't been curious about why dogs were different to other mammals then we would not have such a good understanding on why this shorter life expectancy occurs
- Science is based on evidence: Science is based on evidence because we have to have a solid explanation based on evidence to why larger dogs live shorter lives than smaller dogs
I think this is a very interesting topic because I have two dogs and I would like to know how long they are going to live. According to this article, my little 12lbs dog is going to outlive my 30lbs dog. This also make sense to me because the bigger dogs get the more problems they seem to develop. However, it is the little dogs, like the Shih Tzu, that always get the eye problems!
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting article! I'm a big dog kind of person so this article is very interesting to me. I agree with Josh and would love to know just how long my dog can live. It'll be interesting to see the results of their next study and what caused the larger dogs to always age faster. I would like to add an NOS theme that science is subject to debate and tentative. There will be more research done to help back this study up and the researchers are already looking further into what causes the larger dogs to age faster.
ReplyDeleteThis is such a cool article so I decided to do some more research on it! I thought it was funny that the size to life expectancy ratio does not occur with ALL animals. Like that elephant and mice analogy. Here is a chart of dog sizes as well as their life expectancies dependant on their size.
ReplyDeleteLink to chart:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Nu348uRGGpw/Sr0Zezm5i1I/AAAAAAAAALY/47mMMPPnwNg/s320/DOGageCHART.png
This article is very intereting. My dog recently died at the age of 13 and she was a pug which is a fairly small dog. But I also have a jack russel mix and he is medium sized dog. it will be interesting to see if the age of death is much different for my dogs.
ReplyDelete