If there is a core principle at the heart of every morsel of health and lifestyle advice that we give away here at VP it could well be this: If you want your dog to live a long and happy life, you must minimize the amount of excess fat in her body. (We’ve expanded on that general principle here.)

This is a deceptively powerful little admonishment.  It draws on several well-developed strands of scientific evidence, all of which suggest that excess body fat will decrease your dog’s quality of life, expose her to all manner of dangerous diseases, and increase her risk of premature death.

But take a second and think not about what this important principle is saying, but what it’s not saying. Specifically, note that the core of our fitness and lifestyle philosophy has nothing to do with losing, dropping, maintaining, or managing body weight. Read More

It has been my experience that most people believe that they make healthier lifestyle decisions than their generational predecessors. There is a compelling causal narrative at the core of their beliefs: scientific researchers uncover new truths about the world every day; as that newly-discovered information trickles down into the mainstream over time, we all become more informed; and informed decision-makers are “better” decision-makers.  For many of us, that “trickle down” process explains much of how we form beliefs about what types of lifestyles to avoid and what types to embrace. Read More

At Varsity Pets we beat our anti-body-fat drum loud and proud. Body fat kills dogs. And we want our dogs to live for a long time. So we’re against body fat.

The purpose of this article is to explain one of the reasons why body fat is so dangerous, not only for dogs but for other animals as well.  Specifically, we’re going to look at the tendency of body fat to induce harmful systemic inflammation through the secretion of adipokines.  I promise that the explanation will be shorter, simpler, and less technical than that overview makes it sound (although I still expect that will be the last sentence that many of you will actually read – bye-bye, wimps!). Read More

Obesity kills dogs.

It’s that simple, really.  We can spend our time discussing the specific health conditions that have been linked with obesity – nasty stuff like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.  Or we can focus on figuring out how obesity does it’s dirty business – explaining the specific biological processes going on inside an obese body.  But the bottom line is this: all else being equal, an overweight dog is likely to die about 1.8 years earlier than a lean dog. In terms of “actionable knowledge,” that’s really all we need to know.

So what’s a loving dog owner who just wants his or her dog to live a long, full life to do about it? How do you put that knowledge to work?

You take three simple steps:

The first step is admitting that your dog could have a problem.  You don’t have to form conclusions or wed yourself to a position, just open your mind to the possibility that your preconceived notions about the appropriateness of your dog’s weight could be wrong.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds.  It will require that you overcome your natural tendency to deny that there’s anything “wrong” with your dog.  This tendency will be exacerbated by the inescapable conclusion that you, as your dog’s guardian and caretaker, are responsible for shaping the animal’s lifestyle. Many people are not honest and caring enough to look at themselves with the kind of critical perspective necessary to make that sort of an admission (it’s no real surprise that canine obesity is wildly under-diagnosed). But you can do it – remember, you’re going through this unpleasantness because you love your dog and you want her to live as long and healthy a life as possible. It’s worth it.

The second step is figuring out whether your dog does have a problem.  If you’ve completed step one, then this one will be a piece of cake.  Just use one of the several scientifically-proven methods for determining whether your dog is overweight.  They’re designed to be quick and easy, they require no special equipment, and they can all be performed from the comfort of your living room.  Best of all, they’ve been proven to be accurate and effective, so, in a matter of minutes, you can have an objective analysis of your dog’s body composition.

If the results show that your dog isn’t overweight then you’re in luck (and in the minority) – you can skip step three.  Just keep doing whatever you’re doing.  Thanks for reading.

If, on the other hand, your cold, un-emotional analysis reveals that your dog is overweight or obese, then you need to take an important third and final step.

That third step, of course, is doing something about the problem.  Canine obesity is a puzzle that can be effectively attacked from all sorts of angles, from simple dietary changes to improved exercise habits. Our regular readers will know that we use this blog as a platform from which to highlight some of the most interesting, effective, and note-worthy ones (along with publishing other canine fitness and wellness content).  Keep up with us and we’ll give you an assortment of ways to solve the obesity problem, leaving you free to chose the solution that fits best with your lifestyle.

Just three simple steps.  If you want your dog to live a long and healthy life, it’s really that easy.

It’s easy to forget that the world as it appears to a dog is very different from the world as it appears to you and me.

I mean that literally.

Because we all “know” that our dogs experience the world differently than we do (at least in the sense that we’ll all agree with that statement if we’re asked).  We just do a poor job of keeping that thought in mind when interacting with our dogs.  Even if we leave aside the vast but tough-to-classify cognitive differences between our species, the significant perceptual differences are all too easy to overlook.

Take the sense of smell for example. You know, of course, that a dog’s nose is thousands of times more powerful than your own. But it’s easy to forget about the experiential implications of that difference. In fact, it’s very difficult (if not impossible) to accurately imagine what it feels like to have a nose that’s as powerful as a dog’s.  I, for one, don’t think that my best imagining work comes remotely close to replicating the richness, complexity, and vibrancy of the smells which populate a dog’s nostrils on any given moment.

Or, alternatively, consider the sense of vision.  We all know that dogs are colorblind and can’t distinguish between reds and—

Hold on a second.

First of all, that’s not true.  Moreover, this post isn’t designed to be a wandering philosophical rant about the subjective nature of experience.  It’s a quick-strike assault on a common misconception, the oft-repeated but incorrect belief that dogs are “colorblind.”

The published, peer-reviewed, data-supported, scientific truth regarding dogs and color perception can be summarized in three points: (1) dogs do perceive colors, (2) the colors that dogs see are not as vibrant as those seen by humans, and (3) dogs can’t see as many colors as humans (they mainly see yellows, greys, and blues).

Now let’s go deeper.

Jay Neitz, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington, is one of the world’s leading color vision researchers.  Throughout the 1980s, he conducted experiments aimed at illuminating the capacity for and nature of color vision in the domestic dog.  He documented his findings in his often-cited 1989 paper “Color Vision in the Dog.”

In this report, Dr. Neitz describes color matching experiments that he and his research team performed with greyhounds and toy poodles.  Using multi-color light-illuminated panels and food rewards, the researchers trained the animals to identity uniquely illuminated panels (the panels were presented as three alternatives, two of the same color and one of a unique color, the researchers rewarded the dogs for identifying the “odd man out”) using their noses.

The researchers tinkered extensively with the wavelength and frequency of the light being used to color their panels, running thousands of trials of different combinations of color type and intensity. The dogs did their part too, nosing colored panels and collecting food rewards.  In the end, the researchers obtained some strikingly consistent results, from which we can make some very confident assessments about the nature of canine color perception.

Specifically, Neitz and his colleagues concluded that, instead of seeing a rainbow as violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, dogs see it as dark blue, light blue, grey, light yellow, dark yellow, and very dark grey.  An image comparing the complete human color spectrum with the canine one is available here. As you can see, there’s color on the dog spectrum, but it’s limited and muted.

These results were consistent with what scientists already knew about the biology of the canine visual system, mainly that while the eyes of dogs do contain light-catching cone cells, they don’t contain as many of them as human eyes do.  Moreover, dogs only possess two different types of cones, tuned to two different wavelength spectrums, while humans (and some other rainbow-seeing primates) have three different types of cones, from which arise our full range of color vision.

For more reading on Neitz and his color vision research, click here.

Cheers,

- Coach Dan