Given there are so many of you reading my diary at the moment, I thought it would be a good time to discuss some important political issues with you from the dog perspective. Those of you who have been around a while, or who have read some of my past entries, will know that I am the leader of the Pet Dogs’ Democratic Party. We have, for the last few years, been campaigning on key topics for your average dog. Not that I consider myself average, but you get the general idea. I have been worrying about how we should work out the right retirement age for dogs. Not all dogs live to the same age. I know the same is true of humans, but with humans except where they have a serious medical condition, on the whole the average is more consistent.
However, with us dogs mongrels often live longer than pedigree dogs and large dogs don’t live as long as small ones. If we set the retirement age at say nine years, to be fairly close to the human equivalent, Yorkshire Terriers might enjoy a long and pointless retirement, whilst my close colleague the Bernese Mountain Dog might never reach retirement age at all. I think we need to devise a method of calculating the appropriate retirement according to type and size. Obviously this can’t be by weight as the next thing that is going to happen is your average Yorkie is going to chronically overeat in an attempt to take early retirement.
There must be some similar calculation to the human body mass index that can apply to dogs. If we could use that in conjunction with overall weight, we might actually be able to apply a band of retirement ages to dogs. With humans of course there are some types of families that due to poor diet and living conditions don’t actually live as long. Maybe they should get to retire earlier so that they can enjoy some work free years. I suppose better still would be to improve their general health so they can benefit from a longer life.