We started this journal for our own dogs.

Dog Healthspan began the way most projects worth doing begin — with a dog we loved getting older faster than we wanted to admit. The internet had plenty of opinions and almost no signal. Veterinary journals had the signal but no patience for civilians. We built the publication we wished existed.

What we cover

Five things, mostly. Nutrition and body condition. Movement, in the unflashy daily-walk sense. Cognition and the long, slow drift of aging brains. Recovery — sleep, in particular, which is wildly underrated. And the small, evidence-supported supplement protocols that fit alongside the four habits above.

How we work

Every essay starts with the published literature, not with what feels intuitive. We name the limits of the evidence. We tell you when a finding is preliminary, and we tell you when an intervention has replicated across enough studies that we'd actually do it ourselves. The bar for "we'd do this with our own dog" is the bar for the journal.

Disclosure

The supplements we recommend in our Protocols section are made by Four-Legged Longevity, and we have a commercial relationship with that brand. We're upfront about it because the alternative — pretending we don't — is exactly the kind of thing we built this journal to push back against.

Editorial decisions about what we cover, what we recommend, and what we say about the underlying science are made independently of that relationship. If we don't believe a formulation is supported by the evidence, we don't write about it. That's the only durable version of this.

Not veterinary advice

Nothing on this site is a substitute for a real veterinarian who knows your individual dog. Use what you read here as a starting point for that conversation, not as a replacement for it.