Why I built this
Koda lived to fourteen.
Getting there took multiple TPLO surgeries, more vet visits than I can count, and a long stretch near the end where he was drinking noticeably more water than he used to. Each visit, I learned about treatment options the way most owners do, in a fifteen-minute appointment, under stress, while trying to remember what the last vet had said.
I did the research. I read everything I could find. And I still spent years feeling like I was making decisions in the dark, hearing about an option only after the window to consider it had closed.
The part that still bothers me
Looking back, the data was there the whole time.
The increased thirst was not a quirk of an old dog on a warm day. It is one of the most reliable early signals a dog can give you, and there is a number attached to it. Roughly 100 ml per kilogram per day is the threshold where a veterinarian wants to know. I did not know to measure it. I had no idea it was something you could measure at all.
The same was true of the orthopedic decisions, the pain management, the supplements I bought for years. Randomized controlled trials existed for most of it. Some of them said the thing I was doing worked. Some of them said the thing I was doing did nothing at all. None of that was anywhere I could find it, in language I could use, at the moment I needed it.
The information was not missing. It was scattered across paywalled journals, written for clinicians, and buried under a layer of supplement marketing that is very good at looking like science.
What this site is
It is the thing I wanted at 11pm, sitting on the kitchen floor with a dog who was slowing down, trying to work out whether what I was seeing was ordinary aging or something I should be acting on.
Two halves.
What works. Every treatment I could find good evidence about, graded honestly by the strength of the randomized trials behind it. Including grade D, the treatments that were properly tested and did not work. I paid for one of those for years.
What to watch. A monitoring framework with the specific numbers I did not know to collect. Water intake in ml per kg. Sleeping respiratory rate. Body condition score. Weight, tracked over time, on the same scale. The kinds of measurements that turn "he seems a bit off lately" into a dated trend a veterinarian can actually work with.
Who I am
I am an engineer, not a veterinarian, and that distinction matters enough that it sits on every page of this site.
I grew up around rescue. My mom volunteered pulling animals out of bad situations, and at one point we were fostering twenty-five at once. You learn things in a house like that. You see which animals come back from neglect and which ones do not, which problems resolve with time and which ones were never going to, how differently two dogs of the same age can be aging. As a kid I could see the patterns. I had no vocabulary for them and no way to tell what was real from what I only wanted to be true.
Since then I have had my own animals, and I have watched several of them get old, Koda most recently. What changed between the fostering years and now is not that I learned veterinary medicine. It is that I learned how to work with data, how to read a trial, and how to tell a result that means something from a result that is noise dressed up in statistics.
That is the whole contribution here. I am not producing new medical knowledge. I am taking evidence that already exists in journals most owners will never open, and putting it somewhere they can find it, with the strength of each finding stated honestly and every citation attached so anyone who knows more than I do can check my work and tell me where I have it wrong.
What I am not claiming
I am not a veterinarian. Nothing here is advice about your dog, and this site will never tell you what to do. It has never met your animal, and the person who can examine the dog in front of them is the one whose judgment matters.
What I can do is put the evidence in one place, say plainly how strong it is, show every citation, and keep the whole thing open so that people who know more than I do can correct it in public.
I would have caught the thirst sooner. That is the entire reason this exists.
