According to a new study, we’ve all been counting dog years incorrectly

According to the new study, published in the journal Cell, genetic research shows that puppies and young dogs mature far faster than children – not “just” seven times faster.

A one-year-old puppy is actually closer to a 30-year-old human than a seven-year-old child.

The seven-dog-years-to-one-human-year “rule” is probably partly based on the fact that the average life expectancy for dogs is 12 years old, whereas humans tend to live much longer.

However, clearly, this seems to be a far too simplistic rule.

Researchers were able to compare the aging processes of dogs and humans by examining chemical markers in the DNA of 104 labradors of various ages and tracking how they differed between, say, a 16-week-old puppy and a 16-year-old senior doggo.

The results of the study were then compared to those of human studies that were analogous to it.In this way, they have been able to observe that young dogs age much more quickly than previously believed.A nine-month-old baby, for instance, is physiologically equivalent to an eight-week-old puppy.However, while it appears that young puppies age surprisingly quickly, the study also demonstrates that as the dogs age, the rate of their aging slows down.

The old rule of thumb, easy as it was, simply isn’t accurate.

Unfortunately, the new conversion between human and dog years is a whole lot more complicated.Basically, as the years go by, the number of “dog years” we have to add to the count gets smaller and smaller each year.

We better bust out the calculator next time we want to check how old our little furbabies are!