(no subject)

[deckardcanine]

Some people get mixed up when talking about "dog years." I'm not talking about the conversion scale. While dogs don't exactly age seven times as fast as humans (it's faster in youth and slower later on), these people do know that dogs age faster than humans. But instead of saying "4 human years = 28 dog years," they'd say "28 human years = 4 dog years." I believe that's usually word confusion, not an arithmetic error. The same applies to other "animal years."

On the other hand, if animals had humanlike intelligence but kept their development rates, just imagine the species-centric clashes in this informal language. We use "human year" to mean just a year, as in the time it takes for the Earth to finish a revolution around the Sun. Dogs might measure a year the same way and default that to a "dog year," in which case they'd call a 28-year-old human "4 in human years."

Comments

[deckardcanine.livejournal.com]

I never saw an exact list for dogs, but that's close to what I read for cats: 15 for the first year, 9 for the second, and 4 for each after that.