Insights, tips, and stories to help you better understand and communicate with your dog.
Somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of bulldogs, pugs, and French bulldogs have some degree of brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome. That number landed differently for me when I thought about how many of those dogs you see at the park on any given Sunday, snuffling along, their owners assuming that the noise is just... normal. Just how they are.
Read more
Five minutes. That's roughly how long the difference might be between a dog that feels deeply connected to you and one that's just... politely tolerating your presence in the house.
Read more
A study published this week found that the signals dogs most commonly use to communicate pain are also the ones owners are least likely to recognise. That's not a comfortable fact to sit with.
Read more
Your thirteen-year-old Labrador sleeps through the afternoon, stares at the wall for ten minutes at a stretch, and occasionally seems to forget where her water bowl lives. You mention it at the vet. The vet nods, says something gentle about age, and moves on to the vaccination reminder. And you leave thinking: is that it?
Read more
The jawbone is smaller than you'd expect. Sitting in a research collection for years, unremarkable to look at, it turns out to be the oldest dog DNA ever successfully analysed - and the story it tells has quietly rewritten the timeline of how dogs became dogs.
Read more
Loyal, the San Francisco biotech company that's been quietly working on this for years, announced earlier this week that their daily longevity pill for dogs has now cleared two of the FDA's three required hurdles. That's not nothing. That's actually quite a lot.
Read more
Researchers at the University of Washington confirmed something last week that's got veterinary parasitologists genuinely unsettled: Echinococcus multilocularis, a tapeworm previously confined to wildlife in the northern and central US, has now been detected in coyotes in the Pacific Northwest. First confirmed finding on the contiguous West Coast. That's not a small thing.
Read more
A meat-free dog food just beat everything else on the floor at one of the biggest pet industry trade shows in the world.
Read more
Somewhere in a cold, firelit camp about 15,000 years ago, a hunter-gatherer tossed a scrap of food to a wolf-dog hovering at the edge of the light. That single moment - repeated across millennia, across continents, across countless nameless people and their animals - is apparently baked into our DNA. Both of ours.
Read more
Roughly 68% of dogs showing signs of anxiety or aggression may have a digestive system that's quietly driving the whole thing. That figure isn't something most vets lead with during a routine check-up, but new research published this week by the American Veterinary Medical Association is making it harder to ignore.
Read more
Thirty million Americans are expected to have Alzheimer's disease by 2050, and the most promising clues about how to stop it might be sitting at your feet right now.
Read more
The number appeared in a report published this week and I had to read it twice. Veterinary services now cost 55.2% more than they did in 2019. Not over a decade. Not across some dramatic period of economic upheaval. Six years. And according to the latest petflation data from Pet Business Professor, the broader pet industry is still inflating at 3.3% annually, with vet costs leading the charge.
Read more
tailo