An age old debate

On the eve of my tenth birthday, I have been arguing with my owner about which of us is now oldest.

Those of you who read my post from 25 November 2018 will be able to calculate Gail's current age. Others will have deduced it from the picture above and the fact that she possesses a slide rule...

The question is - how old is Gail in dog years? (By the way, I can never understand why it is usual for dog years to be converted to human years - surely doing it the other way round shows a proper sense of priority...)

So according to conventional wisdom, 1 dog year = 7 human years, which by my calculations and in appropriately dog-centric terms, puts Gail at a relatively youthful eight and three quarters.

However, for smaller dogs, a ratio of 1:6 is often used, and by this measure Gail would be more than ten years old, so a wee bit older than me.

To confuse matters further, one sees charts like the one below, which are all very well, but slightly tricky if, like me, you weigh between 9 and 10 kg, thus right on the boundary between small and medium size.

Finally, you may have seen it reported last year that a team from the University of California, San Diego, conducted a highly scientific study based on DNA methylation etc. and came up with the following formula*:

Human age = [ln(dog age in years)x16] + 31

But as this research was conducted using exclusively Labradors, I think we can ignore the results for now, more especially as they suggest once again that I am the oldster round here...

Fellow pups, do tell me, are you still the baby of the household or do you claim senior citizen status?

*The mathematically inclined among you will already have worked out that according to this formula, at a nanosecond after birth the dog will be age minus six!