How long did dogs live in the 1800s

A look back at how our furry four-legged family members became our friends.

— -- In honor of National Dog Day, ABC News looked back at how our furry four-legged companions evolved from feral wolves into our best friends.

It was originally believed the first domesticated wolves appeared around 15,000 years ago in the Middle East. New evidence, however, suggests it was much earlier than that. Swedish geneticist Pontus Skoglund published a study last year in the journal Current Biology, describing his findings of a 35,000-year-old Siberian wolf bone. He concluded that canine domestication may have first occurred 27,000 to 40,000 years ago.

According to genetic studies, modern day domesticated dogs originated in China, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. According to Greger Larson, an archeologist and geneticist, gray wolves were domesticated by humans somewhere in western Eurasia. He surmises people in the East were also domesticating wolves at the same time.

Scientists believe wolves were first attracted to human camps to scavenge for leftover food. Over time, some wolves started traveling with the nomadic humans and a sort of natural selection for domestication occurred, Dr. Stephen L. Zawistowski, science adviser emeritus to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), told ABC News. Women may have been the first to make these wolves a pet, according to Katherine M. Rogers, professor emerita of English from Brooklyn College, in her book "First Friend." It takes six to eight generations to domesticate a canine, according to a 40-year experiment that began in the late 1950s by Russian researcher Dmitri K. Belyaev.

There’s even scientific evidence supporting the bond between humans and dogs. When people look into each other’s eyes, we bond emotionally and release a hormone called oxytocin. A study led by Nagasawa found that when dogs and people gaze into each other’s eyes, the same hormone is released in both the humans and the dogs.

Dog breeds vary in popularity. In the 1890s, Saint Bernards were the No. 1 breed but since the 1990s, Labrador Retrievers have been the favorite.

Special thanks to Alison Jimenez and Dr. Stephen L. Zawistowski at the ASPCA and Brandi Hunter at the American Kennel Club for their help with the research for this story.

One of the most popular ways to promote unconventional ideas, including alternative therapies, is through fear. Claiming that health, longevity, and other measures of well-being have declined from some time in the past opens the door to claims that science-based healthcare is ineffective and that we should return to some past practice or adopt something radically different. Dr. Karen Becker, a popular promoter of veterinary pseudoscience, recently made just this sort of argument, claiming that dogs are not living as long as they used to and then implying that this can be blamed on commercial pet food and “toxins,” by which her past writing indicates she means vaccines, parasite prevention products, and pretty much any conventional medical treatment.

To demonstrate this, she cites two surveys of pet owners conducted by the U.K. Kennel Club, one in 2004 and another in 2014.

The 2014 survey also found that tragically, the average lifespan of a pedigree dog in the U.K. is just 10 years. In a 2004 Kennel Club report, the average was 11 years, 3 months.

This means the median longevity of Britain’s purebred dogs has dropped by 11 percent in just a decade.

Dr. Becker then goes on to list specific breeds with reported median longevity that is lower in the 2014 survey compared with the 2004 survey.

As we have seen many, many times in the past, Dr. Becker cares far more for her own narrative than for the truth, and she is perfectly comfortable misrepresenting or ignoring facts if doing so will make a story that fits her beliefs and her pitch. This bit of fear-mongering is yet another example.

It is true that the life expectancy figures in the 2014 survey are lower for many breeds than those in the 2004 survey. So, does this mean our pets are not living as long as they used to? Not quite. For one thing, life expectancy figures for some breeds are actually higher in the 2014 report than in the 2004 survey. For example:

Breed	2004 Lifespan	2014 Lifespan
Flat-coated Retriever	9.83 years	10 years
Gordon Setter	11.08 years	12 years
Great Dane	6.5 years	7 years
Greyhound	9.08 years	10 years
Newfoundland	9.67 years	10 years
Old English Sheepdog	10.75 years	11 years

Cherry-picking just the figures that support your claims is a classic move in creating a story that fits what you want to say regardless of the facts.

Overall, the pattern of longevity in the two surveys is nearly identical, as you can see from these figures.

2004 Life Expectancy Histogram

2014 Life Expectancy Histogram

As you can also see, however, the number of deaths reported is very different, and there is no statistical comparison to show whether the difference in the median or mean is significant. Why is this? Well, it turns out the data were collected in very different ways, they represent different methods and different dog populations, and the two surveys can’t legitimately be compared! Here’s what the actual authors of the survey have to say.

Please note there were substantial differences in the way the 2014 survey was conducted compared to the Purebred Dog Health survey, which was carried out in 2004…Given the difference in methodologies between the surveys, the data from each is not fully comparable and differences observed do not definitively imply changes in population parameters.

Furthermore, there were 5,864 deaths reported in the 2014 survey compared to 15,881 deaths reported in the 2004 survey. This significant drop reduces the likelihood of the sample accurately representing the wider dog population, and so would likely have an impact on median longevity figures if the two sets of data were compared, which would not be reliable.

In other words, Dr. Becker is comparing apples to oranges to show that apples were better in 2004 than in 2014. The actual reality, as determined by facts and evidence not one’s pre-existing beliefs, is that we don’t know whether our pets are living longer or not over the last 10, 20, or 30 years. There is excellent data in humans, and that shows conclusively that life expectancy and nearly every other objective measure of well-being has improved steadily for at least the last 100 years. For humans, at least, science and science-based nutrition, sanitation, and healthcare work far better than anything that went before.

There is no reason to believe the same is not true for our pets, however, there is also no reliable evidence either way. What we need is data, and a respect for legitimate scientific research, not more fear-mongering and twisting of the facts to sell an ideology.

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