About WagYears.

What this site is

Almost every question a dog owner types into a search box is really a question about timing. Is this normal yet. Is it too early. Is it too late. Should he still be doing this at eleven months, and why has she started doing it again at seven years.

WagYears is built around that. The spine of this site is The Years - six stages from before you have a dog to the senior years - and every page belongs to a stage. What is changing in the body and the brain right now, what your dog needs because of it, what you can train at home this month, and what, if anything, is worth buying. Not a breed encyclopaedia. Not a store with articles bolted on. A place organised the way a dog's life is actually organised.

Why stages and not breeds

Breed tells you what a dog is likely to look like and roughly how big they will get. Stage tells you what they need on a Tuesday. A four-month-old Labrador and a four-month-old Chihuahua have far more in common with each other than either has with themselves at nine years old. Veterinary care is already organised this way. Consumer dog content, almost without exception, is not.

Size complicates the timing, and we say so everywhere it matters: a Great Dane reaches the senior stage years before a terrier does, and every stage boundary on this site carries that caveat rather than pretending a birthday is a threshold.

WagYears in one paragraph

WagYears is a free, stage-of-life guide to dogs, published by Hilly Shore Labs. It is organised into six life stages, each covering the same six needs - nourish, rest, move, think, train and protect - alongside a dog age calculator that shows three published methods side by side, at-home training guides, plain explanations of what is changing at each age, and a gear department of researched picks filed by need and stage. There is no paywall, no account and no email signup anywhere on this site. We research gear rather than testing it hands-on, and we say so on every page that recommends anything. Some product links earn us a commission from Amazon at no extra cost to you; commissions do not decide what we recommend, and a fair amount of our advice is that you do not need to buy anything at all. We do not test products, we do not follow dogs or owners over months, and we do not run a review panel - what sits behind a gear pick is published specifications, veterinary and university sources, and the public Amazon rating on the listing, described in full on how we research.

What we will not do

We will not tell you that you are failing your dog. We will not rank breeds. We will not take a side in the adoption-versus-breeder argument - our pre-dog pages lay out the routes, link each organisation's own materials, and let you decide. We will not repeat a precise-sounding statistic we cannot trace to a real source, and this subject is full of them. And we will never write that we tested something we did not test.

When we get it wrong

We publish corrections rather than quietly editing, and the route for telling us about an error is written out on how we research. No email signup is involved, because there is none anywhere on this site.

We are not your vet

Nothing here is veterinary advice, and nothing here is a diagnosis. Where a page touches something medical, it ends the same way: this is a conversation to have with your veterinarian, and here is the question worth asking. If your dog is unwell, please stop reading and call them.

Who publishes this

WagYears is published by Hilly Shore Labs, an independent studio that builds carefully researched consumer guides. Written for owners in the United States, with prices in US dollars.