Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.

I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today, psychologist Renee Lertzman will help you understand how to work through the feelings you might be feeling

thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. But first you'll learn why one dog year

doesn't equal seven human years. Let's satisfy some curiosity.

One dog year does not really equal seven human years. The truth is that a dog's age is a lot more complicated than that.

So where did this idea come from?

Well, let's dive into the history.

It's tricky to pinpoint the exact source of this rule,

but different points in history calculate the human dog age ratio differently.

A 13th century inscription at Westminster Abbey said that one

dog year equal to nine human years and then an 18th century naturalist said it was nine

or ten human years. So eventually someone probably reckoned that the average human lived for 70 years and the average dog lived for 10, so the 7 to 1 rule was born. But think about it. Dogs reproduce when they're around one year old and some

live 20 years or longer. If one human year were equivalent to seven dog years, then humans would have babies at age seven and live up to 150 years old.

So here's a better way to compare our ages. Back in 1953, French researcher A Leboe

divided the lifespans of dogs and humans

into milestones that included puberty, adulthood, and death.

He figured out that dogs don't age in parallel with humans.

Instead, they age more quickly at first, then more slowly.

He calculated that a one-year-old dog is equivalent to a 15-year-old human,

a 2-year-old dog is equivalent to a 24 year old human, and then every dog year after that is equivalent to 4 or 5 human years.

Of course this varies by breed and weight, but it's more accurate than the old seven-year

...