Quantified Dog
By: Anne H Milley
Tags: Husky, Jmp, Graph

My daughter has wanted a dog since she could say the word. She memorized an encyclopedia of dog breeds when she was five. First, she wanted a Nova Scotia Duck-Tolling retriever, then it was a sheltie, and finally she settled on wanting a Siberian Husky. My husband and I both had family dogs growing up and wanted to have a dog, but we both traveled for work, and we wanted our daughter to be older and more responsible to help (especially with a high-energy breed like huskies!). After saying no for years (and we had other pets — cat, hedgehog, fish), we finally agreed and began to research and prepare for some months before finding the husky puppy our daughter selected, which she named Luna.

Wanting to facilitate the housetraining, I insisted that everyone record Luna’s business, noting the time, and being watchful for what signals she was sending to minimize accidents, which were also recorded. My daughter had researched that for each month a puppy ages, the puppy develops greater bladder control with the ability to hold it for about an hour longer. Eager to get to the point of sleeping through the night, I wanted to see the time lengthen between incidents, so all the data went into JMP. Further research revealed that puppies don’t have fully developed bladder muscles until 4–6 months, which is quite evident in this graph. (Luna was three months old when we got her and soon after things stabilized, we stopped recording the data.)

The similarities of caring for a toddler were striking, which made me curious about developmental comparisons to humans. I found a website that lets you enter your dog’s breed and age to compute a rough equivalent in human years. Dogs develop more rapidly in the first few years making the oft-cited 1:7 ratio for dog years relative to human years not really applicable. Since I have photos approximately corresponding to each month of Luna’s life, I thought it would be fun to show the progression using images as markers.

If we plot canine age relative to human age, it’s a simple linear relationship for the first year. To better show the more rapid rate of development early on, I include a plot showing dog age divided by human age.

And here is Luna’s age trajectory relative to human age for her expected life span.

Luna was 20 months at the time of this writing, so the equivalent of a 15-year-old. Given the breed and that my daughter was also 15 at the time, there was no shortage of attitude in our house!

Always looking for ways to engage Luna’s brain, I learned about “nose work” (having read Being a Dog) and was happy to see a beginner nose work class offered where we completed Luna’s basic obedience training. We did some beginner nose work, and she did well. Alas, we had to stop as it is treat-based and Luna gained some weight — first after she was spayed, as expected, but unbeknownst to us, she was also getting in to the high-calorie kitten food (we got another cat). I should have been weighing her regularly, but this requires me getting on the scale, noting my weight, and then weighing again while holding Luna. In these pandemic times, I have not wanted to see my weight that much! The good news is that Luna has lost 6 pounds and maybe we can revisit nose work.

An earlier version of this article was published in the JMP user community on February 6, 2019.