The nutritionally-tailored pet food service, tails.com, are aiming to use their unique data and insights to improve the lives of dogs and their owners with the launch of Data Labs.
Since 2014, tails.com has gathered information on the health, well-being and life expectancy of hundreds of thousands of dogs. Data Labs is designed to make good use of this insight and to help tails.com work with vets and industry professionals to enhance the research on dog health and nutrition and enhance the lives of our canine companions.
Sean McCormack, head vet at tails.com, says: “As a vet in practice you gain an understanding of general animal issues and trends. But what this data can do is look over hundreds of thousands of dogs, unpick all of the nutritional, breed and age-related data we’ve collected over time and then provide an insight-rich window into the best possible way to care for our dogs.
“We’re really just scratching the surface in terms of what we have at our disposal. There’s real potential for Data Labs to fundamentally change the way that we view dog nutrition and dog health going forwards.”
The database has already provided useful insights, including:
- In certain breeds, a significant proportion of owners are unaware that their dog is overweight
- Being overweight or obese can take months, or in some cases, years off the lives of dogs
- Evidence to suggest that there are improvements in life expectancy when overweight dogs return to an ideal body weight
- Neutering our dogs is associated with a longer life expectancy across 15 of the studied dog breeds
Lorna Brightmore, lead data scientist at tails.com, says: “We are renowned for being a nation of dog lovers and the data we have has huge potential to unlock insights which have a direct impact on the well-being of our pets.
“Even at this early stage, we are finding strong associations between a number of health factors and longevity and our conclusions will only become stronger over time.”
The first major milestone of Data Labs will be the publication of tails.com’s first peer-reviewed scientific paper. The paper will detail the effects of body weight, body condition, gender and neutering on the longevity and health of dogs, with further scientific papers planned for publication in the coming months and years.
For more information go to tails.com.
