What Are Dog Years?
19-NOV-1997  jim.cerny@unh.edu

I thought that dog years were straight-forward. That you take a dog's age in years and muliply by seven to get the equivalent in human years. Conversely, to convert your age to dog years, you would divide by seven. Simple. If you wanted to get sophisticated you could treat it as a non-linear conversion, looking at it as stepped conversion with several multipliers.

But I was wrong!

Some insist that human years should be multiplied by seven to get dog years. The logic is completely backwards. Some argue by analogy with Internet years, where it is sometimes said that three months on the Internet is equal to a normal year. OK, if you apply the analogy correctly, i.e., a dog's year is speeded up just as an Internet year is speeded up, so use a multiplier to convert to human years or normal-events years, respectively. And, finally, some use the term just to mean bad years.

Convinced or not, you may be interested in some of the other occurrences of "dog years" on the Internet:

• Frank's World for most elaborateJavaScript dog-years calculator.
• O-Matic band's debut album in 1996, called Dog Years.
• "In Dog-Years" poem by Patrick Martin (1989).
• "DogYears" lyrics by Radar Rose (Jane Gabrielle and Sonny Campbell).
• "Dog Years" poem (unsigned).
• "Dog Years" books.