JULY 1998 BACK ISSUE

Part of Horse Previews Magazine website. Posted on 7/2/98; 2:00:00PM.

Lifespans

Here at Red Ink Ranch the cats have nine lives but everybody else is aging. Our discussions about breeding Keeper, the family dog, are more poignant. At five years old her biological clock is ticking. Seems like just yesterday she was a bounding puppy.

As usual, I started to ride Venus each morning when her foal turned two months. After a little work over a few days, the wife noticed Venus had developed some wind puffs on her hinds. This alarmed me at first, then I realized she was ten last April. I remember way back when I was forty: the weight stayed on longer in the spring and the leg tendons got surprisingly achey from the early morning trapse out the road to get the paper.

The conditions of being mortal need perspective. Below is a simple chart showing the approximate age relationships (in years) between you and two of your favorite animals. Example: if your dog is ten and your horse is twenty-five, you could be seventy.

You	Horse	Dog
10	2	1
20	5	3
30	7	4
40	10	5
50	15	7
60	20	8
70	25	10
80	30	11
90	35	13
100	40	15

Bob Howdy, PhD