Corvallis Gazette

THE SHORT LIVED DOG.

Its Normal Length of Life but One-Seventh That of Man.

Surely it is by an unfortunate dispensation of nature that the dog, beyond all question the chief friend of man among the other animals, should have a normal length of life which is no more, on a fair computation, than one-seventh of his own. There is no other figure which expresses the relative ages of man and his dog so well. The puppy of one year is about at the same canine age as the child of seven. At two years he is probably a little more advanced than a fourteen-year-old boy, but the canine age of three is very nearly equivalent to the human twenty-one. And so it continues through all the years of canine and of human prime respectively, the ratio fairly well preserved. It has to be admitted that the old age of the dog, thus computed, outlasts the old age of the man. One hears stories which seem to be fairly authentic of dogs living up to eighteen, and if we do hear stories of human beings living similarly up to 126, at least we do not believe them. But such an age for a dog is quite the extreme limit. The dog of ten years approaches the equivalent of the three score and ten which has been named as the fair end of the human creature's tether, and on the whole the multiplication of canine years by seven all through the stages of life gives the corresponding age of man better than any other figure gives it.-Westminster Gazette.